


Tumbling FF7

by esama



Series: Tumbling Snippets [1]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, Gen, M/M, Snippets, many many oneshots, many many plots, preslash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-01-14 22:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 33
Words: 54,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1281526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snippets done to prompts from Tumblr. Mainly Cloud centric. Crack, slash, AUs and lots of time travel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Defeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by laleiragoblin: Hmmm… time-travel cloud lands in Wutai at the beginning of the war and fights for them?

Sephiroth was beaten. After two years of war, of fighting and triumphing over samurai after samurai, he had been taken down with condescending ease.

Of course, he had heard of the Phoenix of Wutai. No one knew where the man had come from, if the Wutainese had just conjured him up from nothing. A few months back, he had simply appeared and began wreaking havoc against ShinRa's troops – all alone, without needing so much as a single man to back him up. Just this man, against hundreds of troops and tanks and helicopters, and he defeated them all.

And now Sephiroth too. The ShinRa issued broadsword laid in pieces on the ground before the teen, who himself was just as useless as it was. The other man had done something to his knees and he couldn't get up from the ground. All he could do was sit there on his bleeding knees, and wait for the killing blow.

The Phoenix of Wutai was a surprisingly small man. Sephiroth could see where he got the name, though – his hair was all gold and spiky, sticking every which way in spikes that were not unlike feathers. There was nothing passionate about him, though, nothing like what the name had indicated. Instead, he's expressionless, his glowing blue eyes cold and emotionless.

"Well, do it already," Sephiroth snapped at him, looking between the man and the colossal sword in his hand, its blade sectioned and shattered oddly – it looked like it weighed at least as much as the man himself did, most likely more, and yet the Phoenix had wielded it like it weighed nothing. Like it, despite its length and reach and sheer mass, was a natural extension of his body.

At least with a blade like that, death would come quickly.

The Phoenix didn't lift the blade to kill him though. Instead, he hoisted it to his back and there was a click as the magnetic holster grabbed hold of the blade, keeping it there. Then the man walked closer.

"By capturing me you gain nothing," Sephiroth informed him, wincing. This was not an outcome he had expected, not after all the things he himself had done on the battlefield. He had been in Wutai only for two years, but he already had a name on those battlefields. The Silver Demon.

The Phoenix stopped in front of him and then knelt down and if Sephiroth could've, he would've backed away from him. The man stared at him for a long while and then finally spoke, frowning. "How _old_ are you?" he demanded to know.

Sephiroth winced again. "Fourteen," he spat.

"Fourteen," the man repeated. "Fourteen? You've been here for two years, and… They sent you to war when you were fucking _twelve_?!"

"I am capable!" Sephiroth snapped at him, because he was, he had been – every obstacle but this, he'd conquered them all. And without this man, he would still be conquering Wutai, fight by fight, battle by battle. "My age has nothing to do with my abilities."

"No, not your abilities. Your mental development, though…" the Phoenix grimaced. "Fourteen. Fucking Gaia, but ShinRa is messed up."

Then, before Sephiroth could answer that insult, the man suddenly shifted forward and before Sephiroth knew it, he'd already been slung over the Phoenix's shoulder. For a moment, gaping in shock was all Sephiroth could do, before he realised that the man really was capturing him.

"ShinRa will give you nothing for me!" he told the man hurriedly. "They told me that when they sent me here – I'm only worth what I can do. If I get captured, there will be no answer from ShinRa's side. They can make more like me!"

"I know. ShinRa can go screw itself, for all that I care," the Phoenix answered, turning and starting to make his way towards the Wutai camp. "It's not them I want, anyway."

Then, while Sephiroth tried not to curl in fear – because that, _that_ implied something much worse than ransoms and demands – the man laughed. "The Great Silver Demon in his adolescence, in the throes of puberty. This is going to be _hilarious."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	2. In Layers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by peaceful-fury: Cloud baking (i just want to see Cloud making elaborate cakes)

When Cloud fails to get into the SOLDIER program, he doesn't bother with the Infantry. SOLDIER was his dream, to become a hero, and he has no intention of settling for a supposed second best and then die as a nobody behind a uniform worn by thousands of identical nameless nobodies.

But he has no intention of going back to Nibelheim with his tail between his legs either. So instead he starts looking for a job in Midgar, with every intention of staying and making the place his home, and damn how hard it would be because _he was going to make it_. Somehow, he was going to make it.

The first job he gets is… not very good. Working in a fast food joint is degrading, the customers are horrible, the hours are terrible, and the pay is hardly worth mentioning. But he does the best he can, without complaint, always with a smile that's just good enough to seem real, and just small enough so that he doesn't have to put too much effort into it. The job's not enough to pay for rent in _Midgar_ though, so he finds another job too.

And so every morning from one a.m. to four a.m., he delivers mail to the sleeping citizens of Midgar. It's another utterly thankless job, and much more taxing than working at the fast food joint, but it’s better too. For one, there are no annoying customers spitting in his face about getting orders wrong. And for another, running up and down endless stairs in the endless ten story buildings of Midgar, well. It's good training.

Together, though, the two jobs leave him pretty much dead to the world, and so he starts looking for a third that might relieve him from the first two. For a long while he doesn't have much chance, until he sees a catering company that's looking for an assistant. When he applies for the position, he doesn't honestly expect to get it – but miracle of miracles, he does.

"Better to get someone totally unaccustomed to the work that you can train to work just the way you want them to, rather than someone with the experience but all the bad habits you can't get them to get rid of," the boss says and hands Cloud a bowl and an electric mixer. "Let's get started."

In the two months he works at the catering company, Cloud mostly does the tasks that no one sees in the final result. He mixes the dough and tends to the ovens and occasionally he mixes the icing, though usually the boss does it himself. Then, whenever they're hired, Cloud carries boxes back and forth from the truck and tries to be as unnoticeable as possible.

But two months later, the company goes under – there's not really that much call for catering in Midgar, it turns out. So Cloud is left looking for yet another job. This time he has a bit more experience, though, and so he searches for the more specialised positions.

When he finds out that the ShinRa HQ Cafeteria is looking for someone to work on kitchen duties, Cloud hesitates for a while. But ShinRa pays the best in the whole of Midgar, everyone knows that, so somewhat hesitantly he applies for the job. And gets it too, to his dismay and excitement.

It turns out, most of what’s done in the Cafeteria kitchen is making things that are absolutely overflowing with sugar. "Who do you think buys most of what we sell here?" the girl who attends the cafeteria counter asks. "SOLDIER, that's who. And they need their energy."

So Cloud bakes a lot of sweet stuff. Pastries with thick icing that's a good 90% pure sugar. Doughnuts with triple frosting and enough sprinkles to cover it all. Fourteen different types of muffins, each and every one of which has a sugar content high enough to send him into a coma if he tries them himself. There's not really that big of a call for cakes, but when Cloud bakes them, they sell too. _Anything_ with enough sugar in it sells, it turns out.

"Okay, who makes these?" someone demands to know, barging into the kitchen with a piece of triple-layered cherry-strawberry-raspberry cheesecake in hand. "Because I need to _marry_ them."

"Erm," Cloud answers, and waves the frosting filled piping bag in his hand at the SOLDIER. "That'd be me."

"Oh," the SOLDIER says, looking him up and down with his glowing Mako eyes while Cloud looks back, a bit uneasy. Then the SOLDIER shrugs. "So, you want a May wedding?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	3. Ware

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by rahmakapala: Cloud becomes hacker

There's nothing to do in Nibelheim. Most of the time it's too cold to go outside, or there are too many monsters about, or it's raining ice and lightning and in general, Nibelheim is just too damn unhealthy a place for anything to be done. So most people don’t – instead they stay indoors, cultivating this or that hobby. Knitting, sewing, woodwork, and engineering are surprisingly popular in Nibelheim, as is music. Almost every household has a flute or a set of pipes, with the Mayor boasting of his piano like it is god's gift onto the town.

And just about everyone has a personal computer because without one, they'd be even more isolated than they already were. Even the small, poor, and downtrodden Strife family has one – though Skye Strife prefers to tinker with engines rather than circuitry.

Cloud, though, takes to the computer at an early age. They have no manuals, no guide books, no explanatory texts, so he learns largely by doing – and by making mistakes. He figures out how to read and write on the keyboard, learns how to calculate on the screen, and learns to make and mend whatever he breaks in the code. When the computer crashes under his care, it's under his care that it is repaired too, because Skye sure as hell isn't taking the thing to be repaired professionally. So, Cloud learns more than to use a computer – he learns how to manipulate it.

He doesn't realise until later that the LAN isn't just one part of their personal computer, but something that connects the whole town together – not until he hacks the whole thing by accident, and sends cute chocobo chick videos to everyone in town. Nibelheim buzzes about the _hacker_ for about a month afterwards and Cloud doesn't dare to try doing anything to the local area network for a long while.

But then he has a bad day, the townsfolk are being _assholes_ – and the network is just there. So he just… does. This time he doesn't send them cute videos though – instead he makes all their computers play the ShinRa anthem for about fourteen hours straight. He feels a bit better afterwards.

The first time he accidentally slips into the servers of the ShinRaMansion, he isn't expecting it. For one, no one's lived in the mansion for years and the place isn't even supposed to have _power_ , and after being empty for so long, any computer that still even exists there shouldn't be working, not to mention running. But it is – connected to the Nibel Reactor, the ShinRaMansion servers are still in mint condition, being the older generation of ShinRa tech that is much more sturdy and durable.

The things that Cloud learns very nearly literally _blow_ his mind. About ShinRa's Science Department and the early stages of the SOLDIER program, about Sephiroth and Professor Hojo and the Jenova Project. For almost two months, Cloud does nothing but read and read and read ShinRa's secrets, soaking them up like a sponge. When he hacks the Reactor's servers, it's pretty much an afterthought – and the Makonoid Experiments aren't really that interesting, not after Jenova and Sephiroth.

He's ten, when he brings down the defensive network around the mansion, and sneaks in to meet Vincent Valentine – of whom he had learned from Lucrecia Crescent’s triple-encrypted hidden files which she really should've known better than to store on _ShinRa_ 's servers.

"A hacker?" the gunman asks, incredulous, after Cloud's done explaining everything.

"There's not much else to do around here," Cloud shrugs. "Anyway, I just thought you might want to know about the stuff, so…"

He uses the secret laboratory's printers to get all the stuff he's learned – before stumbling into the _physical_ research library that isn't stored on the servers. While Vincent goes through the experiments that were done to him and Lucrecia's notes, Cloud dives into the books and folders of the research library and learns about the Ancients and the Calamity from the Sky.

"So," Vincent asks later while Cloud scans the key books into his own personal files. "What are you going to do next?"

"Dunno," Cloud answers and thinks about it. "I kind of want to know more though. I'm thinking… Midgar will have more data. Also, the SOLDIER program seems interesting and I can't get into it here."

"After all you know about the way they're produced, you _want_ to be a SOLDIER?" the gunman asks, incredulous.

"No, psh, I don't want to be a SOLDIER," Cloud waves the notion aside. "But I do want into the program. Every science program needs at least one computer geek in it, you know. And if the security they have here is any indication of the state of affairs there, they definitely should get an upgrade."

And being inside ShinRa should make hacking it all the easier, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	4. Bully For You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by beyondblacksilver: Ang sees bullying that leaves Cloud constantly on the ground but he just stands up again Ang wants to meet the person who doesn’t stay down.

Angeal didn't much like to admit it, but ShinRa's military had a lot of hazing. Most of it was basic, ridiculous stuff from the younger recruits who were still in the high school mind-set – humiliating but generally painless stuff one might expect from teenagers. Some of it was a bit more serious – beat-downs and fights and occasionally ganging ups of many against one.

Whenever he saw any of it, he intervened – which naturally rarely happened. No one in the military was stupid enough to have a go at someone right in front of their superior officer. But every now and then he would walk into a scene of hazing – usually around the time a new batch of cadets had entered the SOLDIER program – and he would take action.

And this was one of those cases – or so it seemed. Among the newest set of thirty cadets, there had been a particularly small, particularly blond, and particularly _pretty_ young man and they all had known what would follow. And that was what Angeal found in one corridor: six boys ganging up on the little blond one, surrounding and leering and –

And then two of them were on the ground, clutching their privates. A third followed, slung over the blond kid's shoulder and right into a wall where he collapsed in a heap. A fourth tried to grab the kid only to have the kid dance away under the outstretched arm and then the attacker was slammed into the wall, the blond kid's hand on the back of his neck helping him on the way. The fifth hesitated for too long, and ended up on the floor, clutching at himself in the same way as the first two.

The sixth, wisely, looked at his fallen comrades and turned tail, running past Angeal like Ifrit was coming after him.

The blond kid stood among the five downed cadets and he looked _confused_.

"Cadet?" Angeal asked, just about as confused as the kid. "What the hell did you just do?"

"Um," the kid said, scratching his neck. "I'm not entirely sure? I mean, I'm used to being ganged up, so I can sort of handle myself, but I didn't…" he frowned and looked up, pointing at the bigger, tougher, and yet weaker cadets at his feet. "Not everybody here is this weak, right? I mean… that would be just _sad_."

And Angeal recognised that at least. Zack had been like that at the start too and Angeal had a sudden feeling that this kid wasn't from the East. "Where are you from, Cadet?" he asked slowly, wondering.

"Nibelheim, sir. It's a small town on the Western Continent, just a bit southeast of Rocket Town."

"Ah. That explains it," Angeal answered and looked down at the other cadets, who were now realising what they had just faced off against, and were not so subtly trying to crawl away. "There's a strength difference between the West and the East that you'll come to know pretty soon," Angeal said. "The monsters in the West are quite a bit stronger than those here in the East. And some of that naturally translates to the people."

"What, really?" the kid asked, dubious.

"Yes. Nibelheim monsters tend to be rather high level, don't they? Have you fought them?" Angeal asked.

"Yeah, of course. We have… a lot of wolves around the town, and they need to be pushed back all the time," the kid said thoughtfully. "I can't take a Nibel Dragon alone yet, though – but I managed to take one down with a friend of mine once."

"… Aren't Nibel Dragons level thirty two?" one of the boys on the floor asked and they all stared at the blond kid in outright _horror._

"Yes. Yes they are," Angeal agreed and looked down at them. "And that ought to teach you five not to judge a book by the cover because unless you have someone in your group who’s from North continent, this kid is probably the strongest among your group."

"Fucking hell, sir," one of the kids gasped.

"Um," the blond kid said, looking a little wide-eyed. "Are you _shitting me_?"

"No, I am not – and I'll let the language pass this once, but you _are_ addressing a superior officer and it won't fly from here on," Angeal said severely but with a smile. "What's your name, Cadet?"

"Um. Strife, sir. Cloud Strife," the kid said and tried to throw a haphazard salute.

"Well, Strife. Come with me. We'll need to test your level before you accidentally kill one of your fellow cadets in a spar," Angeal said and laughed at the shocked looks all the cadets gave him. "Oh, yes. It's a real possibility and it's happened," Angeal told them, amused. Namely, Zack had almost taken a kid's head off in his early days as a cadet, when some idiot had put him against another kid who was from _Kalm._

"Well, come on, let's go have a spar," Angeal said to a wide-eyed Strife, who stumbled after him, awkward and still shocked.

It would be interesting to watch how Strife – who, judging by the look of things, had been bullied a _lot_ in his hometown – would deal with the sudden apparent increase in strength. Zack had done well enough – hadn't become arrogant and hadn't taken advantage of it. But with bullied kids, it was harder to tell. Some became bullies themselves, while others became cold and aloof and never interacted with their weaker fellows.

Time would tell what Strife would do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't do bullying.
> 
> Proofread by Tsuyu.


	5. Prehensile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by yumiko21: Cloud gains an extra apendage during the Mako tests. (Not wings)

Cloud wakes up in a sea of green, with something poking him in the back of his thigh. Slow and dragging, he turns to look and sees something dark and spiky, before everything fades into the green.

He wakes up again, and the something is digging into the insides of his thighs, and he's lying on a table, with a man looking over him, looking fascinated. The man has black hair and glasses and a scalpel in hand, and soon everything dissolves into pain and blood.

Cloud wakes up, and the man is gone. He's in green again, but it's more red than green, the colours blurring into each other in swirls. His lower back hurts and when he touches it, to try and figure out why, it feels rough under his fingers. It cuts his fingers and for a while he just watches how the blood spilling from the cuts swirls into the green, before it’s dark again.

When he wakes up for the fourth time, the green is green once more, and he can see through it. He can see the room – no one is there – and he can see the tank beside his and there is someone there whom he knows. He stares at the someone for a long while before he remembers – Zack. Zack who was nice and had looked after him, who had taken care of him – they'd fought together.

So he fights the blackness this time and tries to figure out how to get to Zack – but he's trapped in the tank, and no matter how he pounds at the glass in front of him, it refuses to budge.

Then something slashes out, and suddenly the glass has long scratches on it all around Cloud and before he can figure out what caused them, the whole tank breaks, splintering and spilling and leaving him on the bottom, no longer suspended. Coughing and hacking, Cloud pulls out the breathing tube from his throat and the needles from his neck and arms and crawls out and over the mess of glass and Mako, naked and shivering. He looks back.

The skin of his lower back, just over his spine, is dark and ridged and spiky. It rises in a way that it didn't use to, and goes on in a way that isn't anywhere near natural. The tail rises in a long sinewy arch, the back ridged in spikes and it ends in what looks like five curving spikes, all of them long and sharp and jagged – sharp enough to cut glass, apparently.

Together, they form a pincer-like claw that looks like it could very well punch holes through anything it might ever try to grab.

After a moment of staring at the thing, Cloud, still on all fours, lashes out with the tail again, and the front of Zack's tank is slashed to pieces, the tail spikes making quick work of the bullet-proof glass. Zack, as naked as Cloud is, slumps to the bottom of the tank, and Cloud quickly drags him out, his tail arching back to balance the weight.

When the guards come for them, the scientists following, the tail makes quick work of them too, lashing and ripping through bone and flesh with even more ease than it had with the glass, leaving behind bloodied and broken bodies and torn off limbs. Cloud ignores them and the blood he himself is splattered with, and drags Zack with him away from the laboratories, away from the basement, away.

The showers in the mansion above are enough to wash away the Mako, but the tail stays where it is, long and sinewy. While Cloud experiments with the claw, trying to take hold of the showerhead with it, it rips the thing into pieces, making the water spill every which way from the ruined showerhead.

That's when Zack wakes up, under the water, and stares at him. "Cloud?" the other asks, looking at him like he doesn't recognize him. "Cloud."

"Zack," Cloud answers – growls through a mouth with too many teeth, a mouth that opens too wide. Wincing, Cloud touches his cheeks which feel as if they've been ripped open, the corners of his lips reaching further back than they naturally should. " _Zack_ , they – did…" His voice sounds like it comes from belowground, rumbling in his throat like a half swallowed roar.

The tail lashes out, agitated, and claws the bathroom tiles into ruin and then Zack is there, holding him. "Cloud," he says again, and it's almost enough to calm Cloud down. Almost.

But he can see his hands now and his fingers end in claws, and he realises that he hasn't stood up once – that he probably _can't_ because his legs are strange now, the shape all wrong, and his body isn't _right_ anymore. His tail lashes out again and punches holes through the walls. Zack holds him tighter, through the panicked fit and the ensuing destruction, until Cloud calms down, just enough, to begin sobbing instead.

Later, they escape the mansion – though not before going through the research files and setting it all on fire as revenge for the damage that they can do nothing to undo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be slash and pre slash coming up soonish. So yeah. 
> 
> Proofread by Tsuyu


	6. Pick up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by werewolfzero: Cloud goes back in time just before Hojo kills Vincent and then the two raise Sephiroth together

Cloud drove to the front of ShinRa Mansion and was immediately surrounded by the guards – one of them a Turk, three of them infantrymen, all of whom had him and his bike at gunpoint.

"I have a delivery for S. R. H. Hojo," Cloud said to them without turning Fenrir's engine off. He took out the supposed package – a simple little box, wrapped and tightly secured. "It's from Midgar – marked urgent."

"Let me see some ID," the Turk demanded, holding Cloud carefully at gunpoint.

Cloud considered that, and then sighed. Well, he hadn't really expected it to work, anyway. "Just a moment," he said, and squeezed his hand around the package, his fingers tearing through it easily and grasping the single orb of materia that had been inside it. Before the Turk or the infantrymen could do anything, he had already fired up the Seal materia and cast a Sleep on all four of them.

Soon, after letting Fenrir's engine quiet down, he was inside the mansion and making his way through the meagre sum of security. It really made a huge difference, not having to encounter any SOLDIERs – even the couple of Turks that had managed to fire on him hadn't really had any luck at punching through his shield and barrier spells, and the one infantryman who had seriously thought to break the shields with physical assault… well. It had been kind of pitiful.

But of course there wouldn't be any SOLDIERs. They hadn't been invented yet.

After everyone in the mansion was deep asleep under the Sleep, Cloud headed down to the basement, equipping the Seal into his wristband. He took a moment to knock on the wall behind which the coffins were before continuing to the labs. Vincent probably couldn't even hear it, but whatever – it was polite.

In the laboratories there were more people than in the mansion above – but no security. Their loss.

"Who are you? Where are those idiots upstairs – who let you in here?" the esteemed Professor Hojo said, just before Cloud shot him – and everyone else in the room – with an All equipped Sleep. The sight of eight scientists all just going down at once was rather satisfying for their former-future-never-gonna-happen-specimen, and Cloud took a moment to appreciate it.

Then he took a couple of running steps, jumped, and landed on both feet, hard – and right on Hojo's chest. There was a sort of squishy crack that only human ribcage makes, when it's crushed, and it echoed _beautifully_ in the labs. With a happy sigh, Cloud listened to the echoes fade, before leaving the good professor with his well demolished torso behind.

He found a comatose Lucrecia Crescent in a room that could only be mockingly called a recovery room, and an infant, new-born Sephiroth in an incubation chamber, just as comatose as she was – and hooked to what looked rather like an intravenous Mako drip. After a moment of considering the scene, Cloud walked back into the labs, picked a scientist at random and Esunaed the man awake.

Then, while the man was still trying to gather his wits, Cloud gently took him by the neck, and turned his face to Hojo's bloody corpse.

"So," Cloud said. "You are going to help me a bit or I'll do that to you. You hear me?"

The man let out a noise that wasn't quite human and croaked. "I swear, my hearing's never been as acute as it is right now."

"Good," Cloud nodded. "Lucrecia Crescent. Let's wake her up, shall we?"

It took about two hours – and a couple of extremely high level Cures and Esunas from Cloud – before Lucrecia Crescent came to with a gasp. She was a bit confused for a moment, but eventually became lucid enough to ask after the child and Hojo – why wasn't her husband there, to tell her how it had gone?

"The kid is currently in another room, comatose, with a Mako drip," Cloud said. "Hojo is currently dead by _massive_ blunt force trauma on the lab floor. And _you_ currently have two options."

"What?" she croaked, her eyes wide.

"You are either going to help me get that kid into rights… or you're not," Cloud said, leaving what else the _not_ entailed to her imagination.

She didn't even need to think about it – but then, she was supposed to be a smart woman. With her and the nameless scientist who really didn't need to look so terrified, they had Sephiroth off the drip and in some actual clothing – without the drip, Sephiroth was supposed to wake up by himself eventually; using stimulants on him wouldn't be a good idea.

"Great, wonderful," Cloud nodded and unceremoniously dropped the nameless scientist with a Sleep. Then he moved to get Sephiroth from the table where Lucrecia had laid him. "And now we shall be off. If you have something you want to take with you, get it now."

"But –" Lucrecia started to say and then seemed to think better of it, as Cloud gently eased the infant into the shelter of his vest, securing him there carefully with his belt – as good as a sling, and better for the kid than carrying him out in the open. Soon, Lucrecia had a bag of things together, with some papers and books spilling from the side, and a determined look on her face.

"One more thing, and then we can be off," Cloud murmured and then walked out of the lab and to the trick wall that hid the chamber of coffins. After a moment of considering it, he took out another ball of materia and idly equipped it. It was a Gravity – and it only took a relatively low level Demi to shatter the wall in front of the hidden chamber.

Vincent _was_ already awake, looking a bit bleary where he was standing, leaning against the coffin. He looked up, scowling at Cloud, at Lucrecia, and at the infant Sephiroth hidden almost completely under Cloud's vest.

"Time to go," Cloud said.

"Go where?" Vincent demanded while Lucrecia stared at him, wide-eyed.

Cloud smiled. "The Promised Land."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	7. Ladder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by wingwyrm: Zach being introduced to Angeal’s SO only to find out it’s his younger friend Cloud?

"It'll be fine," Angeal rolled his eyes. "He's reasonable enough, and you've done well."

"Yeah, but my future promotion to First Class is hanging on my first impression, Angeal. I have to do well, right?" Zack asked nervously, running his hands through his hair. "Look at me, I'm all shaky. Cloud got me all worked up – you know, he _laughed_ at me, when I told him I was nervous?"

"That's probably because he knows that you're being ridiculous," Angeal said. "Come on already."

Zack remained nervous all the way through the elevator journey to the Administrative Floor. Ever since Lazard had been promoted to the head of Public Safety Maintenance, SOLDIER had been answering to a new Director, who preferred to keep his office with the rest of the Directors, rather than on the SOLDIER floor like Lazard had.

To Zack it all sounded a lot like the man was either very arrogant, very distanced from his _actual_ job – which was leading the SOLDIER department, of course – or he was just very aloof or something. The First Class SOLDIERs – who were the only ones who really interacted with him – all seemed to like him, though. Even Sephiroth had said something about the man being _very efficient_ or something.

Then they were there, on the Administrative Floor, and a whole world of office cubicles opened up before Zack, where the lower administrative staff worked at their daily duties. They didn't even look up from their computers, while Angeal led Zack through the large office space, and to one of the private offices on the side.

"… Well, yes, of course I know. It doesn't eliminate the issue though," a voice was speaking inside. It sounded… vaguely familiar. "No, I don't care how difficult they are to make. I need them and I'm either going to have them or I'm going to have your _lungs_ for breakfast. And I'm going to make you watch me eat them too."

Angeal, ignoring this lovely bit of dialogue, knocked.

"Yeah, well, _get me the Materia_ and I won't," the voice inside said before shouting, "Come!" and then continued. "I don't care if you have personnel issues – your budget is four times the one _I_ get, and you can damn well afford to hire more people. Hey, maybe I should send some of my SOLDIERs down there. They might do a better job than you're doing."

Angeal opened the door and stepped inside, a nervous Zack following him. Then he stopped, and stared at the office.

There was no desk, no filing cabinets, or shelves, or anything. There weren't even any _chairs_. Instead, there were three couches all facing the middle of the room, where a coffee table sat. And on one of those couches, with his legs propped on the coffee table, sat someone very familiar _._

The blond waved at them, still talking on the phone. "Fine, I _will_. In fact, I know just the person to send, too. Genesis will have _fun_ with you," he grinned and then hung up without another word. "Hello Angeal. Zack."

" _Cloud_?!" Zack asked, horrified. "But… what… I thought you were an infantryman!"

"Technically, I am," Cloud shrugged, motioning at his uniform – which, granted, was an _infantryman_ uniform. "I still have the paperwork and everything. Lazard just _recruited_ me to do other stuff too. Besides, it's easier walking around among the military in a Private’s uniform. And SOLDIERs don't look at me twice if I wander around among the cadets. It's a very efficient way to get to the bottom of any issues there might be in the system."

"Wha…?" Zack asked. "But … you're the _Director_ of SOLDIER? How? Why?"

"It's a long story, which involves my dropping out of university out of boredom and Lazard finding out and sticking his overly polished nose into my affairs," the blond shrugged and turned to Zack's mentor. "So what can I do for you, Angeal?"

Angeal shrugged, sitting on the couch across from the one that Cloud was sitting on. "I wanted to recommend Zack for First," he answered. "And I figured it might be better for him to meet you before that happened."

"I suppose that's a good idea," Cloud agreed thoughtfully, poking idly at his phone. "I can't promote him just like that though – his records are good and his training regimen is impressive, but he doesn't have enough missions under his belt. Not enough experience in dealing with the sort of stuff Firsts have to deal with."

"Which is why we're here – I wanted you to place him higher up on the roster so that he can get the right experience," Angeal nodded. "You're going to be sending some Firsts as back up for Genesis in Wutai, right? I want Zack to be one of them."

"Hmmm… maybe, but not without a supervisor. That means you're going too," Cloud said.

"I feel weirdly betrayed," Zack said, slumping over a bit and sighing. "Fucking ShinRa, man. Secrets and cover ups behind every corner."

Cloud and Angeal looked up at him, the first with eyebrows arching, the other with a sigh. "Betrayed?" Cloud asked. "How so, Zack?"

"Well… you've been lying to me all along, haven't you?" Zack asked, pouting. "I mean, I thought you were just my little trooper buddy. I thought you wanted to _be_ SOLDIER, man, and here you are, the big mighty Director of the whole program!"

Cloud laughed at him – and it was very much a Cloud laugh, quiet but heartfelt. "I _do_ want to be SOLDIER," he answered. "And my rank _is_ still basically a trooper – well, Private First Class, but you knew that already. I _am_ going to be taking the SOLDIER exams in a couple of months. I _am_ from Nibelheim. I _am_ a drop-out. I _am_ very short, very small, not very strong, and in need of serious training."

"But… you're the _Director_."

"Yeah, doesn't stop me from wanting to become SOLDIER too," Cloud shrugged. "At the end of the day, I'll still _be_ the Director even if I make it into SOLDIER yes, but still. A dream's a dream."

"How are you the Director?!" Zack asked.

"A ridiculously high IQ and Lazard being a meddlesome busybody," the Director of SOLDIER shrugged. "It's not that big of a deal, Zack, not really. Mostly I just wander around HQ and that's it."

"But don't you hand out all the assignments? And supervise stuff? Read reports and all that?" Zack asked, getting a bit desperate.

"Yeah, I do it all on my phone," Cloud agreed, waving the said PHS at him. "Gotta love modern tech."

"Is _that_ why you're always on that thing? I just thought you were avoiding making eye-contact with people!"

"You sure he's ready to be a First?" Cloud asked, turning to Angeal and looking a little dubious.

"I'm starting to wonder," Angeal sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Funny thing about this one - wingwyrm probably meant Significant Other. I read it as Superior Officer.
> 
> Proofread by Tsuyu


	8. Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by werewolfzero: Cloud is Angeal’s massage therapist  
> (Cloud/Angeal preslash)

The thing about living in Midgar was… that it was _expensive as ever loving hell_. Everything from the ground up was at least three times as expensive as it was anywhere elsewhere – water cost more, heating cost more, food cost more and so on and so on. And, worst of all, _living cost more_.

Cloud's rent was probably higher than what his mother made in a _month_. All for the luxury of a shitty little hole in the wall that only barely had enough space to walk a few steps in, he was charged his entire infantryman salary almost _literally_ through the nose. It was better than living in the Infantry barracks, definitely, and safer than living below the plate, but… he was left with _nothing_ after he paid the monthly rent.

So he had another job – one that he made damn sure not a single one of his squad mates and, god forbid it, _Zack_ knew about. He wasn't _precisely_ embarrassed by it. It was a valuable skill that his mother had worked hard to teach him, and he was damn grateful – it had made basic a cakewalk for him, while the others had been in constant agony. But if Zack or the others knew about it, they'd never let him hear the end of it.

So he just told them that he preferred to spend weekends in privacy – that he needed to recharge his brain after so much social activity. They, bless their unsuspecting little minds, always bought it, even Zack ever so kindly and understandingly left him alone – he didn't even bother him with his usual incessant text messages. And so Cloud could ditch the uniform, and head to the other workplace.

And head to the Midgar Shade Spa – which was the most ridiculous name, but it got the message across. It was a small little health resort hidden in the corner between the Fifth and Sixth Sectors, with a couple of therapeutic pools, and a roster of fifteen different masseurs, with fifteen different massage methods. And Cloud was their proper Fire-Ice masseur.

Well, he was pretty much the only masseur in the entire _Midgar_ who was a Fire-Ice masseur because Fire-Ice was a technique that’s rather unique to Nibelheim. In Nibelheim, Cloud's mother was one of the last people who really knew how it was properly done, though she did it with actual ice and stones heated in hot water – or in a fire. Cloud, on the other hand, had easier methods at his disposal.

Like actual Fire and Ice materia.

He was rolling said materia in his hands, warming them, when his first customer for the day arrived – and it was a bit of a surprise. He usually only got the older people who tended to have gone through all the more common methods and then resorted to the weirder ones to get rid of their joint pains and whatnot – but this one wasn't old at all. A man, maybe in his early twenties, who, even through the bathrobe, looked rather buff.

"Um. Am I in the right place?" the man said, and his eyes shone in the dim light Cloud preferred. Mako Shine – really intense too.

"If you're looking for Heat and Cold Therapy, then yes," Cloud said, holding the two materia in his left hand and offering his right. "Cloud Strife," he said and when the man hesitated, Cloud smiled. "It's fine if you don't want to tell me your name. I know ShinRa employees – especially SOLDIERs – prefer to keep their business private."

The SOLDIER's eyebrows arched a little, but he smiled. "Thank you," he said and then motioned at the table. "Should I?"

"If you like," Cloud nodded and held the two materia between his hands, feeding them a bit of his energy. He still wasn't as good as he would've liked in using materia un-equipped, and it helped to get them started slowly. "But first, why don't you tell me why you're here? You're not my usual clientele so I'm guessing you have a reason."

"Yes, well. I was injured a little while back – SOLDIERs get pretty decent health care, so I don't even have a scar left, but something didn't heal right," the SOLDIER said while taking off the bathrobe. "And I keep getting back pains. If I had the chance, I'd be in the Mideel hot springs right now, but I can't leave Midgar so I had to find the best alternative – and apparently this place has the only magic using masseur in Midgar."

"Only? Huh. I didn't know that," Cloud murmured. "I knew I was the only one who used Ice and Fire materia together, but I didn't realise no one used _any_. I don't see how the Mideel hot springs are related, though."

"They're saturated with minute amounts of Mako," the SOLDIER said, while lying down on the table on his front. "Nobody knows why, but it gives the springs some incredible healing properties."

"Interesting," Cloud hummed. If he hadn't had other plans for his life, he might've been tempted to have a try at using Mako saturated water in the massages – it sounded like it would have a lot of uses. "I use both hot and cold, though," Cloud said. "So it won't be like with a hot spring."

"Just do what you can," the SOLDIER said, closing his eyes and obviously trying to relax.

Cloud eyed the man for a moment, before getting to work, rolling the materia between his hands for a moment to transfer the magic into his palms. Not much yet, just enough to get started. Then, holding Fire in his right hand and Ice in his left, he pressed the heels of his hands against the SOLDIER's back, and began the search for the trouble spots and what he would have to concentrate on.

 _Injured a little while back_ , the man had said. It felt a bit more like someone had cleaved him almost in half. There was an almost visible line running across the man's back, from the left shoulder to the right hip, and Cloud had to wonder if the man had had a spinal injury on top of everything else. ShinRa's medical could deal with that sort of stuff but… no wonder he had back pains.

"This'll feel a bit strange," Cloud said, and rolled the materia until they were both in the middle of his palms, pressed against the tense skin, and began channelling magic. The SOLDIER, to his credit, didn't cry out. He shuddered though, and there was a surprised gasp and from the corner of his eye, Cloud could see that he had gripped hold of the table's edges.

He didn't quite relax through the whole ordeal, as Cloud fed the magical heat and cold into him, easing his muscles out of their tension with steady waves until most of the knots in the newly healed muscles eased, and the strain relaxed.

"How do you feel now?" Cloud asked, withdrawing the materia and idly rolling them in his hands. He had switched them several times in the course of the massage, and his hands were now both tingling with the magic, hot and cold sparking just beneath the skin.

"Um," the man answered, glancing at him from the corner of his eyes. He was a bit red. "I feel… better. Thank you." He sounded rather embarrassed about it, actually.

Cloud grinned, recognizing the tone instantly – the man felt _more_ than better. "Sorry," he said and put the materia away. "Use of magic tends to quicken blood flow a lot. Don't worry about it, though. It happens to most people," he said and then offered the man his bathrobe. "Do you want me to turn away?" he asked.

The SOLDIER's neck and ears flushed, which was a rather endearing look on someone so heavily muscled. "Please," the man almost choked out, and Cloud turned away, smiling, until the man had had the time to don the bathrobe.

"You might want to have another session if the pain returns, maybe a couple more," Cloud said, absently neatening the space. "I'm here only on weekends, though."

"I'll… keep that in mind," the SOLDIER said, still flushed red. He coughed and glanced at Cloud awkwardly. "So. Happens to most people?" he asked, trying to crack a smile.

"Yeah, it's awkward boner city here," Cloud grinned and looked at him. "Though most of my clients are of the older variety, so it's usually even more _awkward_." Then, just as the SOLDIER started to relax a bit, he had to add "Well, at least you haven't asked me to give you a hand yet."

The SOLDIER let out a choking noise – and Cloud didn't really hold it against him at how quickly he was to run away afterwards.

The next week, Zack insisted on introducing Cloud to his mentor, Angeal Hewley.

Awkward wasn't a strong enough word to cover it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There'll be more of this pairing coming.
> 
> Proofread by tsuyu


	9. Fortune Favours the Insolent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by cock-speed: cloud straight up asking angeal on a date. I’m not feeling very creative, but I am trying to help you with your preslash only problem.  
> (Cloud/Angeal, obviously)

"Excuse me?" Angeal asked, taken aback.

The infantryman shrugged. He was short, very blond, very _pretty_ , and was staring at Angeal with… somewhat unnerving calmness. "It's a simple enough question," he said. "Would you like to go out with me?"

"Um," Angeal said, blinking rapidly.

"I checked the regs and it's allowed. You're not my superior officer, seeing as we're in different branches altogether, and I'm ridiculously unlikely to ever be working under you," the infantryman said. "And since you SOLDIERs can get away with murder, it wouldn't even matter if you were my direct superior officer because no one would say anything about it. Because people are cowards."

"Um," Angeal repeated, a little more insistently.

"And I'm pretty sure you're going to say no, and that's fine, but I figured that I would never know unless I asked, and I don't have the time to wonder about this crap, so I figured I might as well go ahead and get it over with," the infantryman continued.

"Um," Angeal said a third time, because he seriously couldn't think of anything to say. It was rare for anyone in the infantry to come and just talk to a First Class SOLDIER like this, never mind a _Private_. But to talk so… well, _insolently_? The little guy looked almost frustratingly calm about what he was saying – and asking another man out, just like that, in broad daylight, not to mention one of his level? Angeal didn't make much noise of it, but he knew he was pretty high on the ladder of ShinRa's military hierarchy. He knew he was looked up to, idolised, sometimes feared, and generally admired. He knew, as much as he preferred to not think about it, that he had _fan clubs_.

And yet this guy, so low in rank too, just walked up to him and, out of the blue, asked him out? If Angeal had been Genesis, he would have been mortified with offence. He wasn't, though – he was, at best, baffled. And the little infantryman was just _standing_ there, looking at him expectantly.

"Um," Angeal said one last time. "What if I'm not into that?" he asked slowly. While it wasn't frowned upon or anything in the military – no one really cared – it wasn't very common either. And Angeal had to admit, it took balls for someone of this guy's size to just walk up to someone like Angeal – who had a good twenty centimetres and forty kilos on him – and _ask_.

The little guy shrugged. "No way of knowing before I asked, is there?" he said. "And if you're not, then, well, I'll know and can move on."

"Huh," Angeal said, eying him. "Is this a dare?" he asked, just to be sure – because he knew infantry squads had their own ways of hazing their newer members and the little guy looked fresh enough to be green around the edges.

"No," the infantryman said.

He didn't look like he was lying. Angeal folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. "Drunk?"

"Nope, though I have drank four maybe-espressos this morning," the infantryman admitted. "I had morning extermination shift in the slums and they serve stuff with a hell of a kick down there."

Angeal almost snorted at him. There was something very weird – and maybe very wrong – with the infantryman, but he had to admit, the little guy certainly had balls. Angeal, as a rule, didn't date, at all – he had better uses for his time and even if he wasn't more interested in training, well, Genesis, Sephiroth and Zack took up what free time he usually had.

"You have guts, just walking up to me and asking," Angeal commented. "Most people would try sending out feelers beforehand."

"I'm a time traveller who went through an apocalypse at the hands of an immortal space alien, so I don't really care about social niceties," the little guy said. "Life is short and often miserable and if you just sit around waiting for things to get better, they never do. And I think it's just generally better to go straight at things rather than to wait for things to happen to you."

Angeal cracked a smile at that. "And you have a weird sense of humour, too."

The infantryman shrugged. "So?" he asked. "Would you like to go out with me?"

The SOLDIER let out a laugh and shook his head. "Actually, I think I would," he admitted. The infantryman was _very strange_ , but hell, Angeal was a SOLDIER – he worked with _strange_. The infantryman wasn't bad looking either – on the smaller side, maybe, but so were almost everyone else, when Angeal looked at them.

And Angeal had to admit, he was weirdly charmed by the calm insolence. It should've grated on him, but just… didn't. It was _refreshing_ – and he was curious to see how far the calm boldness and the weird humour would carry the young man.

"What's your name?" Angeal asked, a little amused by the whole thing. "I should know, before you take me out."

"It's Cloud Strife, sir," the infantryman said and they shook hands. "How do you like motorcycles?" the infantryman then asked, completely out of the blue.

"Never gave them much thought, really. Good enough as transportation, I guess," Angeal said, eyebrows arching. "Why?"

"How would you like to go for a ride?" Cloud asked, and there was something borderline predatory in his smile. "I promise, you'll give some _serious_ thought to motorcycles after it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	10. No Such Thing As Diamonds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by twoampostman: Cloud is the President’s son, Angeal is his bodyguard? Or Angeal becomes a mechanic, &Fenrir breaks?

 "So that's him? The Nibelheim Bastard?"

Angeal looked up from the paper he had been reading, scowling at the group of Second Class SOLDIERs who were peering down from the higher terrace of the cafeteria. Then, unable to help himself, he looked too.

There was a group of Turks on the lower level, escorting a blond young man across the cafeteria. He had the family look, Angeal had to admit – he didn't look much like President ShinRa maybe, but he looked a lot like Rufus ShinRa and Lazard Deusericus – the same blond hair that defied gravity, and the same somewhat androgynous facial features.

The eyes were different – as was the body type. Even at a distance, Angeal could see the intense Mako Shine in those oddly expressionless eyes – and with the sleeveless vest the man was wearing, the muscle definition of his arms was plain for anyone to see. Unlike Rufus and Lazard, this man was not just trained, but he was _enhanced_.

Angeal frowned, putting the paper down. The president's own _son_ had Mako enhancements?

Then the party was out of sight, at the elevators and gone.

The next time that Angeal saw the so called Nibelheim Bastard, it was two weeks later – one week after the President's somewhat mysterious suicide. The Nibelheim Bastard – and no one knew the man's name – was standing beside Rufus in the ceremony that announced that Rufus ShinRa would be taking the company helm as the president. His eyes still shone, his face was still somewhat androgynous, and he still wore a sleeveless vest.

He was also just as expressionless as he had been when Angeal had seen him in the cafeteria. He had added about half a dozen swords to his getup however, carrying them in a complex, somewhat overblown harness on his back, with the sword handles and blades fanning out behind him like somewhat abstract wings.

Rufus ShinRa, Angeal thought, should've looked a bit more smug. He was all but being crowned the president of the planet. And for as long as Angeal had known him, Rufus ShinRa had been an arrogant, smug little brat. As it was, the new President of ShinRa looked a little ill – but then again, he was only seventeen while his rather formidable half-brother was at least twenty – and _everyone_ had suspicions as to why the President had _jumped_ off the top floor of ShinRa HQ.

No one said anything aloud, though – and neither did Rufus ShinRa, who solemnly accepted the role of the President and promised a great future for ShinRa and for the planet.

The third time that Angeal saw the Nibelheim Bastard, the man was in the SOLDIER training rooms, looking down at Sephiroth, who was lying on the floor in front of him, one of the many swords the Bastard carried pointed at his throat.

"Yield," Sephiroth choked out, his eyes wide, and the Nibelheim Bastard withdrew the sword before offering the SOLDIER First his hand, pulling the taller, heavier, and all around bigger Sephiroth up without any trouble.

There was an uncomfortable silence between them, while the Bastard examined the edge of his sword and Sephiroth retrieved Masamune from where it had been thrown. Then the Bastard looked up. "Again?" he offered.

It's the first time that Angeal had seen such unholy _glee_ in Sephiroth's eyes. It was also the first time that he had seen anyone look so happy to be so soundly beaten – which the Bastard did with almost _offensive_ ease. All those years that Angeal and Genesis had busted their backs just to put a _scratch_ on Sephiroth, and this man, this nameless _anomaly_ , just wiped the floor with Sephiroth without breaking a sweat.

"The treatments they gave you must've been astronomical," Sephiroth muttered, after he had had enough.

For the first time, the Bastard smiled. It was a cold, humourless expression. "Four years in a Mako tank," he said, gathered his swords, and left.

The next time the Bastard came down to the SOLDIER floors, Sephiroth all but _dragged_ Angeal and Genesis with him to fight the man. And it was a _glorious_ fight indeed – to see the blond man using the swords, six of them in total and yet they all fitted seamlessly into one colossal form, to see him switching from two handed to dual wielding to one handed, from short swords to a massive Buster Blade…

And that was even before Genesis brought _magic_ into the fight, prompting the Bastard to answer in kind.

"Have they tried to pin a level on you yet?" Sephiroth asked once they had _all_ gotten their asses handed to them by a man who’s a good head's worth shorter than any of them.

"Ninety nine," the Bastard said, shrugging. "I blew the machine."

No wonder. Even Sephiroth registered in the sixties.

"How the hell?" Genesis asked.

The Bastard glanced at them and smiled his cold smile. "How the _fuck_ do you suppose?" he asked.

For all that the Bastard wasn't much of a conversationalist and seemed to hate ShinRa on levels previously unreached by humanity, he did work for the company, and people seemed to like him. Mostly, he was Rufus' bodyguard, but occasionally he headed out to deal with situations even Sephiroth would've taken back up for. And behind the scenes…

There was no explanation as to why the Gongaga reactor was shut down, but it was. There was also suddenly a new department in the company, called Energy Resources, and rumour was that it was researching alternatives to Mako. As for Rufus ShinRa, well. If he had ever been arrogant or smug, he sure as hell wasn't anymore.

Angeal – and pretty much everyone else – supposed that had a lot to do with the Nibelheim Bastard. But after the man had wiped the floor with the greatest of the SOLDIERs so many times, there sure as hell wasn't anyone around willing to rock the boat on that score. And when Professor Hojo mysteriously committed suicide, no one so much as batted an eye. Even Sephiroth didn't say a _word_ and Hojo was his father.

"As fathers go, I think mine was about as kind to me as the Bastard's was to him," was Sephiroth's only comment. Angeal got the impression that Sephiroth regretted not being able to do the man in himself.

Something changed in the company after that – something intangible but very real. The air seemed a little less… heavy. The Mako treatments the SOLDIERs got changed a little, and somehow they were easier to handle. Hollander, if he had ever had any aspirations of leading the Science Department, oh so graciously declined the position – and if he looked a little wild around the eyes when he said so, no one cared.

Instead, a young woman from _nowhere_ took the position. Except, Lucrecia Crescent wasn't young in the least – she was in her fifties easily, despite looking like she was only twenty or so. She and the Nibelheim Bastard knew each other, and she was, at first, the only one anyone saw the Bastard talking to _pleasantly_.

Then the Bastard came and introduced the woman to Sephiroth personally, because it turned out Lucrecia Crescent was Sephiroth's mother. And no, Jenova wasn't anyone's mother, apparently.

"I'm not even going to ask how you knew that," Angeal murmured.

The Bastard smiled and for the first time, it wasn't cold. It looked good on him – much better than the previous smiles. And the man had a reason to smile, seeing the changes he was making left and right in the company without anyone being able to say a word against him. It was a bit terrifying – but seeing that good things had come from it… Angeal was fully willing to sit back and watch the transformation from the side-lines.

Well, almost from the side-lines.

"Spar?" he offered.

"I'd love to," the Bastard nodded.

Later, Angeal would be the first one to learn the Nibelheim Bastard's real name – and maybe Cloud didn't fit the man very well, but Strife? That fit the man _perfectly_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> proofread by Tsuyu


	11. Double Edged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by twird96: Zack’s a matchmaker for the two

"I have a… favour to ask you, Cloud," Zack had said, oddly tentative. And that had been about enough for Cloud.

 It took him less than a week to get to the North Continent – having one Cid Highwind on speed dial had some advantages. Digging through the frozen valley where the abandoned town of Modeoheim had been buried under several meters of snow took a little longer – almost a month in total, before he finally managed to dig a path into the research centre, just as abandoned and forgotten as the town.

He found Angeal two days later, encased in a sheet of ice that covered most of the research centre's floor. Cloud hadn't _really_ met the man before, but he could recognize him, somewhat faintly, from his days as an infantryman. Angeal, Genesis, and Sephiroth had made the elite trinity of ShinRa's SOLDIERs – they had always been on the cover of at least one magazine, and half a million blog posts. And Cloud, back then, had subscribed to about two dozen different fan clubs – so he had read a _lot_ of those posts.

Angeal looked just like he had in the pictures. The same sharp, yet smooth features, perfectly preserved. The man had been pronounced dead, case closed, years ago – almost ten years ago, actually – and it didn't show at all. The ice had kept him well.

The whole thing echoed eerily of finding Sephiroth in the Mako crystal. Cloud smothered the memories and instead ignited a Fire Materia to gently melt the block of ice and release its captive. After the ice was gone and the SOLDIER First Class had been released, Cloud called Cid for pick-up and then hoisted the larger man to his shoulder, before carrying him up and out of the frozen, man-made cave of the research centre.

Cid, thankfully, didn't bother asking any questions. He just steered the _Shera_ , cursing and smoking all the way to Midgar, where he dropped Cloud off just on top of what had been the Fifth Sector – from where Cloud made his way to the Church.

And to the pool of water that sat there, surrounded by flowers, with the Buster Sword standing over it in silent vigil. Cloud smiled at them both, before shifting Angeal off of his shoulder and into a bridal carry. The man was still cold, still frozen seemingly solid.

With a slow inhale, Cloud stepped into the water. He had done it many, many times over the years, but he never had grown used to the feel of it, the power shimmering beneath the pool's surface. It surrounded him instantly and made him feel like he was wading into pure light, and it was so tempting to just let go and float away in it. He resisted the temptation, and instead released the SOLDIER First Class into the water, watching how the man slowly sunk just a few centimetres beneath the surface where he floated, suspended, in the middle of the pool.

It took Angeal almost the whole day to thaw and float to the surface. Cloud watched over him the whole time from the edge of the pool, tending the flowers surrounding it and, when people wandered in, refilling their bottles from the pool. The people didn't even bat an eye at the man in the SOLDIER uniform floating in the water – it wasn't that unusual a sight, after all. Even these days, years after the End of Geostigma, people still came in for treatment.

The second day in the pool, Angeal began to breathe. It was slow and barely audible. But as time passed, his breaths grew steadier, their pace normalising. Until finally, on the third day, the man woke up.

Cloud watched silently as the man came to, blinking at the sky above the pool. "Is this… heaven?" the SOLDIER First Class asked, confused and looking around until his eyes found Cloud, sitting at the edge of the pool.

"I'm afraid not," Cloud answered with an awkward smile. "You're in Midgar. Or in what's left of it, anyway."

"What's… left of it?" Angeal asked, confused, and shifted to his feet in the pool. He looked around and his eyes landed on the Buster Sword, standing over the pool like a tomb stone. The man looked almost horrified to see it. "Why is… how… what happened?" he asked, turning to Cloud.

Cloud let out a breath at that, not sure what to say.

He knew what would follow would be difficult. When Angeal had gone under, ShinRa had been at the peak of its power. Sephiroth had been alive, and firmly on ShinRa's side. _Zack_ had been alive, and with a promising future ahead of him. Mako power had been the _only_ power in use. The Wutai War had just been won, and the Wutai islands had been claimed by ShinRa.

So many things, all of which were no more. ShinRa, despite Rufus' attempts, was gone, as were Sephiroth and Zack, and Mako. Wutai was free once more, and under the rule of its re-crowned emperor. The Planet was different – and Angeal had missed the cataclysmic changes it had gone through.

Explaining all that would be difficult. Cloud didn't even know where to _start_. And after all was said and done… who knew what the man would do. Angeal had deserted from ShinRa long before all of it. How to begin?

Cloud smiled. "Zack says hello," he said. "And that it's your turn to embrace your dreams."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	12. Awake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by sumigoddess: Cloud is a Turk who shadows Angeal in his spare time.

Cloud kept to himself, watching from the side. The Modeoheim mission had proven to be a disaster so far. They had achieved their goals, at least seemingly so. Hollander had been caught, Genesis had been defeated and Angeal…

 "I can't," Zack Fair gasped, finally getting up from his mentor's side. "Someone… someone else do something with… I-I can't –" and with that, he all but stumbled out of the room with the Buster Sword held clumsily in his hands, leaving Cloud and Tseng alone with the downed SOLDIER First Class, Angeal Hewley the Honourable.

Cloud said nothing, looking first at the downed SOLDIER and then glancing up at Tseng, who was examining the room idly. Cloud did the same, coming to the conclusion that there were no recording devices and no cameras – and whatever equipment there were in the Modeoheim facility wouldn't work anyway. Cloud had seen to that, while Zack and Angeal had been fighting.

"Looks like we're clear. Wake up, Strife," Tseng said, and Cloud relaxed his awkward infantryman stance, swinging the useless standard infantry rifle to his back.

"Did you really have to go this far to turn this mission into such a fuck up, sir?" Cloud asked, curious. "Though I have to say, the thing you did with the helicopter? _Beautiful_." Tseng had crashed the helicopter in a clear airspace with no faults or failures in the machine itself, made it seem perfectly believable, and _no one had died_. Cloud could pilot a helicopter too, no problem, but he couldn't do _that_ – hell, he wouldn't bet on his own survival if he intentionally tried to crash one.

Tseng smiled faintly. "Why thank you, Strife, I appreciate the compliment," he said. "And yes, I really did have to go that far. Check Angeal."

Cloud shrugged and jogged over to the downed First Class. Instead of checking for a pulse, he pulled his sleeves up to reveal the thick bangles around his wrists, both with four materia slots in them. Quickly, he equipped a scan materia into one of the free slots and powered it up, slamming the spell right into Angeal's face.

"I got brain activity. Cardiac arrest," Cloud said and shook his head in amazement. Damn SOLDIERs – _impossible_ to kill.

"Good," Tseng nodded briskly. "I'll leave it to you then. You have eight minutes – make it believable."

Cloud checked his phone for the time and nodded. "And Genesis?" he asked, frowning – because if what Zack had done to Angeal wasn't enough to kill him, then a little fall was sure as hell not enough to kill Genesis.

"If you encounter him, deal with him as you see fit," Tseng said, already walking away. "You and Angeal are not my problem anymore and if Genesis comes after you, you're on your own. Good luck."

"Aye aye, sir," Cloud said, throwing a lazy salute at the man and then equipping a Lightning, Restore, Heal, and Revive in quick succession. As Tseng closed the doors behind him, Cloud fed energy into the materia and then began the process of reviving Angeal. With a couple of Regens piled up on each other on the man, Cloud fired the Lightning on his left bangle, the Revive on his right, and concentrated until he had both spells sizzling in his palm.

Then he slammed the electric charge and the revival spell, both right into Angeal's chest. It took three such blasts before the Scan began registering a heartbeat, and then a Cure and Esuna on top of the Regens to get the man breathing again. Throwing a couple more Cures to undo some of the damage that Zack had done, Cloud nodded in satisfaction before checking his phone for the time.

Then he equipped Quake into one of the remaining materia slots in his bangles and Barrier into another. With a couple layers of Wall around him and Angeal both, he waited until his eight minutes were up and then powered the Quake. Trusting Tseng to take care of Zack – who really wasn't all that bad, for a SOLDIER – Cloud began casting.

It didn't take much, to collapse the research facility on top of them both.

Angeal was comatose for most of their forced stay in the collapsed research facility, while Cloud waited for the sound of helicopters. They came four hours after the building collapsed, and left an hour after that. Just to be sure, Cloud waited for another hour, whiling the time away by coming up with new and interesting ways of applying Fire spells – aimed at a piece of metal pipe, it created a very convenient source of heat that kept them both warm in the enclosed space he had created with the Wall.

Then, deeming it safe enough, Cloud hoisted the still unresponsive Angeal into a fireman's carry, fired the Wall again, and began pushing his way through the rubble. Funny thing about Wall – it repelled everything, no matter how hard and heavy, and the building’s remains parted like water around him as he simply walked out of the ruins of Hollander's and Genesis' secret hideout.

After that, it was just a matter of deciding what to do next. In the end, Cloud simply headed for Icicle Inn.

By the time Angeal awakened in Icicle Inn's little hotel, Cloud had bleached and dyed the man's hair, shaved him, plucked his eyebrows, and applied a spray-on tan on the man to turn him a couple shades darker. His own hair had been cut shorter and dyed a bit darker – which was really taking it a bit too far. It wasn't like anyone would recognize him – no one even _knew_ him, after all. But it didn't hurt to be thorough.

"What… what the –" Angeal blinked, staring at him, while Cloud went through some clothing to figure out which suited his new look the best. "Where am I? I thought I…?"

"Died? You did. And then I revived you and dragged you away," Cloud said, smiling. "How are you feeling?"

Angeal blinked and glanced down at himself. "Like I'm still alive and still degrading," he admitted, sighing and closing his eyes. "Why didn't you just let me die?"

Cloud shrugged. "You signed some papers when you joined ShinRa Electric Power Company, and there are people inside the company who think those files ought to be honoured. My handler being one of those people," he said. "And he felt you ought to have different options."

"So, you're a Turk," Angeal scowled at him. "I chose my option and that was to die at the hand of my student – and you took it away from me!" he snarled.

"It's a sucky option, if you ask me," Cloud answered while rummaging through his pockets and bringing out a sleek metal case. "How about secrecy, freedom, and the chance of a cure?" he asked, popping the case open. "You and Genesis, regardless of what you may think, are not the navel of the planet – nor are you the first SOLDIERs to have this little illness. You took your reaction to it to new and dramatic heights, though. The others, well. They did what they ought to."

"Which is?" Angeal grumbled.

"They took a _sick leave_ ," Cloud snorted and took the syringe from the case. It had a dose of faintly shimmering clear liquid inside it. "This might sting a little," he said, and before Angeal could argue, he plunged the needle into the man's shoulder.

"What is that?" Angeal asked, wincing, as the liquid spread through his veins. He let out a surprised breath and leaned back, shocked. "What _is_ that?" he asked, now with wonder in his voice.

"You'd be surprised at what sort of people we have in the Turks," Cloud murmured. "And what sort of capabilities those people have. The Science Department would _weep_ to have some of the human resources we employ."

"But… that was… why?" Angeal asked.

Cloud shrugged. Tseng was a bit weird and had weird notions about right and wrong. Tseng also had the largest array of Sleeper Agents that any other Turk probably ever had. Some of them were inside the company itself, like Cloud – and some were on the run from it, like Aerith. One day, Tseng would take over the entire company and no one would know because the puppet he would place in charge would be Sleeping, too.

Sleeping, until Tseng decided that the company's agenda didn't coincide with his own brand of right and wrong.

Cloud smiled at the SOLDIER First Class. "Welcome to retirement, Angeal Hewley," he said. "The pension sucks, but trust me, the health care will be _stellar_ from here on out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	13. Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by heiyue: Angeal gets injured and separated from his troops on a mission near Nibelhiem. Time-travel/AC Cloud helps him

Angeal woke up feeling warm and not as hurt as he expected. The fight with the Nibel Dragon still played behind his eyelids and he was pretty sure that he ought to be monster food right about now and if not that, then at least pretty thoroughly chewed up.

Had the troopers come back for him? He doubted it – he had sent the men away specifically to keep them away from the fight and, hopefully, alive so that there'd still be someone left to send back a report to Midgar. Mt.Nibel was damn near infested and would need more than just an eighteen year old SOLDIER and a single squad of infantrymen to clear it – it needed at least a full regiment.

But if the troopers hadn't come back, then how…?

Frowning, Angeal glanced around. It didn't look like an infirmary or a hospital of any sort – actually it looked like someone's rather Spartan bedroom, with nothing there but the bed, a bedside table and a wardrobe that sat in the corner of the room, looking rather forlorn. Confused, Angeal shifted to sit up – very careful with each movement, in case he was injured. But there was no pain, whatsoever. Even the wounds he very clearly remembered receiving were gone, not a single scar left.

Someone had healed him – and not with any low level Cure either. Someone had used a _Curaga_ on him.

After a moment of hesitation, Angeal got up, got his boots from where they were sitting beside the bed, and cautiously ventured out of the bedroom. He was in a smallish cottage, he found – aside from the bedroom there was a joined kitchen and living room type of space, and a small bathroom which he made use of. There was no one in the cottage though, and the fire in the stove that seemed to be the only source of heat was going out.

Somewhat hesitant, Angeal opened the front door and very nearly closed it instantly after – it was _cold_ outside. And not cold like Nibelheim cold – cold like the _peak_ of Mt. Nibel cold. He fought against the urge though and pushed the door open fully, stepping outside.

The view from the cottage was breathtaking; overlooking the entire range of the mountains that Mt.Nibel was a part of. It was hard to say if he was in Mt.Nibel itself, or somewhere nearby, though. But he recognized the view of the unique mountain peaks, having seen them before. So wherever he was, it couldn't be too far from Nibelheim.

The cottage had been built on a sort of mountain ledge, half into the shelter of some jagged rock formations. There was a small pool in front of it, obviously manmade, and a small mountain brook trickled into it from higher up the mountain, melt water from the icy cap. There was a man there, sitting on the edge of the brook, soaking his _feet_ in it.

"Good morning," the man said without turning to Angeal. "How are you feeling?"

"Surprisingly well," Angeal answered, confused. "Considering that the last thing I remember is fighting a dragon."

The man nodded. He was blond, a little shorter than Angeal, and rather heavily muscled for a guy so slight – and judging by the sleeveless vest and the fact that he was _soaking his feet in an icy mountain pool_ , he wasn't bothered by the cold winds in the slightest.

"You collapsed just a little before I found you, I'm guessing," the man said. "Since the dragon hadn't eaten you yet. Lucky for you."

"Yeah," Angeal agreed slowly, and stepped forward and closer to the pool. "You healed me? And brought me here? Where is _here_ , anyway?"

"And fought a dragon over you," the man added, smiling and turning to look at Angeal. "We're just a little off of Mt.Nibel – that's it there," he said, pointing at the closest mountain. "The reactor's on the other side."

"Huh," Angeal said, peering at the mountain. It looked like he would have to climb down, and then up again, to get to Nibelheim. "Why didn't you take me to the town?"

"There are no proper doctors or materia users there. They would've let you die," the man shrugged. "And my first aid supplies were all here, so it seemed like the wisest thing to do."

"My thanks," Angeal said, looking at the man curiously. Then, he had to ask, "Aren't you cold?" because he, personally, was _freezing_.

The man glanced at him and then smiled. "Come here and try it," he said, waving Angeal over. Curious and hesitant, Angeal did – and found to his surprise that the water _wasn't_ cold. It was actually rather warm – almost hot, even.

The blond man pointed to the bottom of the pool. There, beneath the crystal clear water, were glowing shards of green materia, imbedded in the stone. "Fire materia," the man said, shrugging. "I'm feeding them a bit of energy to heat the pool – partially to keep warm and partially to make sure that the pool won't freeze over tonight."

Angeal squinted at the materia. They didn't look like orbs. Actually, they looked rather like they were natural parts of the rock. "Are they… naturally occurring?" he asked curiously.

The man nodded. "When this mountain range was being formed, there was a lot of naturally flowing Mako here," he explained. "Some of it got trapped in the rock while it was shifting about, so there are a lot of natural materia veins here. There's still a lot of Mako flowing around the mountains, though. That's why there are so many Mako springs around the mountain range – and that's why the Nibelheim reactor was built on _top_ of a mountain."

"Huh. I've never even heard of it. And I didn't know there could be materia _veins_ ," Angeal murmured and, after a moment, kicked off his boots and took off his socks and cautiously dipped his feet into the warm water. It wasn't quite as warm as the hot springs of Mideel but… it was nice.

"Materia is easier to make than it is to find in nature," the blond man said and after glancing at him, he frowned at the water. A moment later, the pool began to steam as its temperature rose by several degrees.

"Oh, this must be so lovely during winter," Angeal murmured. Nibelheim, he had heard, got some terribly cold winters. To be able to endure that in this heated little pool…

"It's pretty handy," the man agreed and held out his hand. "Cloud Strife," he said. "Congratulations on not being eaten by a dragon."

"Angeal Hewley, and thanks," Angeal said, shaking the hand. "I rather like not being dead too." They were quiet for a moment before Angeal cleared his throat again. "Do you live alone here?" he asked, curious.

Cloud shrugged. "Kind of," he said, and there was something old in his eyes, despite the fact that he couldn’t be that much older than Angeal. "Some people come by, every now and then, but mostly it's just me. Better that way, I suppose."

Angeal eyed him, frowning. "Sounds lonely."

"There are worse things," Cloud shrugged. "And the view is nice. I miss flowers, but… it could be worse."

"I suppose nothing grows this high up," Angeal murmured. They were quiet for a moment, listening to the howling of the mountain winds and enjoying the heated pool. "I should probably head to Nibelheim," Angeal then said. "Before the men I was with file a dead in the line of duty report on me."

"I suppose," Cloud said, giving him a smile. "You probably need a guide, though. It's not easy, getting up here."

"I'd appreciate it," Angeal agreed.

After drying off and pulling their footwear back on, Cloud showed Angeal where his weapons and gear were and then, with Cloud carrying nothing but the clothes on his back with him, they began their way down the mountain – and then, a couple of hours later, up another. Cloud showed him a couple of Mako springs on the way and even urged him to take a naturally formed fire materia with him, before they made it to the road that led from Nibelheim to the Mako reactor.

"And this is where I leave you," the man said. "I chased the dragon away, and hopefully there won't be any more around here, but be careful on your way back."

"I will. Thanks," Angeal nodded and then hesitated. "Though I feel a bit bad about not paying you for helping me. I mean, you went out of your way to heal me and everything and…"

"It's fine," Cloud assured, already walking away. "Just take care of yourself. And Zack too, when you see him."

"Who?" Angeal asked, confused, but the man was already too far away to hear over the howling of the mountain wind. For a moment, Angeal was tempted to shout after him, but the wind was freezing and he rather wanted off the mountain first.

The troopers hadn't filed a report on him – because they had only arrived in the town a mere half an hour before he did. When Angeal questioned them about why it took them so long to get down the mountain, they said it hadn't.

"We left you just an hour or so ago, sir," the confused troopers said, much to Angeal's confusion. "Congratulations for defeating the dragon! You SOLDIERs are really something else."

Later, when Angeal asked the Nibelheim Innkeeper about Cloud Strife, he was pointed in the direction of a ten year old boy, with blond hair and blue eyes – too busy watching his mother tending to a motorcycle engine to pay any attention to Angeal. As for what came to living up in the mountains, well, apparently no sane person would – too many monsters, too cold, too hard.

And there were no such things as veins of materia in the Nibel mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	14. Mechanized

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by the-cocky-bitch: cloud works as a mechanic under the plate for money,Angeals meets him and likes him,then Zack introduces him to his trooper friend  
> (Cloud/Angeal)

It was rather strange how hard it was to find an actual repair shop in Midgar. There were engineers and inventors by the dozens, but good old fashioned mechanics, with the sort of shops and tools and the old fashioned know how to _fix_ things?

It all had its roots in ShinRa's policies, Angeal mused as he followed the haphazardly written instructions through the Wall Market. ShinRa wasn't the sort of company that encouraged its customers to _repair_ their things, after all. No, it’s better for ShinRa if the customers brought whatever was broken back and got a new one in its place – for a small fee of course. That translated to everything else and now there just wasn't such a thing as a repair mechanic above the plate.

Below the plate was a different thing. There, no one could afford anything new, so the life of every product was extended as much as it could be, by fixing and patching the thing until it just fell apart. Which led to the Slums having the only engine repair shop in the entire Midgar, apparently – one that, judging by the front, specialised in motorcycles and such.

Shoving the instructions into his pocket, Angeal stepped inside, almost jumping when an actual _bell_ announced his arrival. Above plate it was all automated with nice, unassuming beeps and despite coming from a poor family, Angeal had gotten used to the luxury of automated door bells. The actual bell – which hung on a hook above the door – was almost an alien device.

"Hello?" A voice asked and Angeal looked hastily down. Instead of an actual _shop_ , what he found himself in was definitely more of a garage. It was just as haphazardly thrown together as any other building in the slums, with the walls made of seven different materials at least. But the tools that littered the space looked sound – the sort of old, stained, work-worn, and _heavy_ tools he had learned not to expect from ShinRa. ShinRa's tools were all power tools, but here he could see hammers and wrenches and even screwdrivers.

There was only one man in the shop, a blond man in a black jumpsuit, working with what looked like a motorcycle engine. He had tinted goggles on and a smear of grease on his cheek.

"Yes, hi," Angeal said and for a moment considered how to word his problem. Then, since there wasn't really a good way of putting it, he decided to go straight to the heart of the matter. "You wouldn't happen to do weapon maintenance?"

The blond man's eyebrows arched. "Occasionally," he admitted, leaning back a bit. "What kind of problem do you have?"

Angeal motioned at the Buster Sword on his back. "A forty kilo blade is too big for anyone to handle," he admitted with a wry smile. "It's gone dull and it's not very practical to try and sharpen it with a whetstone – but no one has the sort of bench grinder that would work for it. I could do it, but I'd rather have it done properly."

The mechanic considered him for a moment before setting down a wrench and getting up. "Well, let's see it then," the man said and actually held out his hand for the sword.

Angeal, after a moment of hesitation, took the Buster Sword and held it out, amusedly waiting for the man to sag under the weight. But he didn't – instead, he grabbed hold of the back of the blade in _one hand_ and held the blade even, running a gloved finger along the blade.

"Steel," the man commented. "Just steel."

Angeal shrugged. It wasn't exactly the best sword material and definitely not what he would've _liked_ but it did the job. It rusted damn near instantly if not oiled properly, but with a blade of the Buster Sword's size, it didn't need to be Sterling or Damascus.

"Yeah, I have a wheel big enough for this. It's for a harder metal, but it should do the trick well enough," the man said then, handing the blade back. Angeal waited while the man set up a bench grinder, fitting a sharpening wheel onto it and getting it running. "Do you want to do it yourself?" the man then offered.

"You don't mind?" Angeal asked, surprised.

"It's your sword," the man shrugged. "Have at it."

Pleasantly surprised, Angeal sat down and went about fixing the blade. The mechanic had set the rotation speed _just_ right, he found to his surprise – fast enough to have enough of a bite, but not so fast as to heat the metal too much.

"Do people come here often for stuff like this?" He asked over the whirr of the grinding.

"Occasionally – though usually not swords as big as that," the mechanic said, watching him curiously. "That stone's mostly for my own blade – had to get it special from ShinRa. Cost me half this shop," the man added, snorting.

"Your blade?" Angeal asked curiously and the man nodded, motioning to the wall nearby. And there hung one of the biggest and most complicated harnesses Angeal had ever seen, and below it stood six large swords leaning against the wall. A two handed broadsword about as tall as the man was, a hollow cleaver a little shorter but with a bigger blade, two identical long swords sharp on one side and lined with grooves on the dull side, and two short swords that one could've almost called daggers if they too weren't so big.

"Impressive," Angeal commented. "What are they made of?"

The man considered and shrugged. "It's a superalloy."

"It's _what_?" Angeal asked, with a surprised laugh.

"Superalloy. You know, one of those mixes. I don't know the exact percentages but it's iron, cobalt, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, aluminium, chromium, titanium, zirconium and so on and so on and so on," the mechanic shrugged. "It's a soup of about twenty different elements; metals, metalloids and nonmetals alike."

"Oh," Angeal said. He hadn't ever even heard of such things but then again he was a SOLDIER, not an engineer – or a mechanic. "Wouldn't that be expensive?" he asked dubiously.

"Yeah, it would've cost a fortune if I had it made, but I knew a guy and made the sword myself," the mechanic said. "It's the best sword I've ever had too, but a bit of a bother to maintain, because the metal's so hard."

"Huh," Angeal murmured, looking at the swords thoughtfully. "You keep saying _sword,_ " he then said curiously. "Which one of them do you mean?"

The mechanic let out a little laugh and walked over to the swords. Then, in an utterly baffling and then absolutely _fascinating_ move, he began fitting the six swords together like a jigsaw puzzle. First, the hollow cleaver fitted into the two handed broadsword, then the two identical long swords fitted into the other two, lengthening the blade by two inches at least. Then, finally, the two smaller short swords had their handles flipped up and they were fitted into the base of the blade.

The final result had a shape that wasn't much different from the Buster Sword.

"How much does that thing _weigh_?" Angeal asked in horrified fascination.

"Fifty seven point four kilos," the mechanic said, lifting the sword and holding it straight in one hand. "And also it can equip ten materia in five linked pairs," he added and smiled with obvious pride, running his hand along the assembly of blades. "Isn't she beautiful?"

"Absolutely gorgeous," Angeal admitted. He had to wonder though, at the kind of mechanic who could make, own, and so effortlessly _wield_ a blade like that. And single-handed too. A SOLDIER could do it, but a civilian? Plus there was the implied skill to the sword's use – because six blades of varying makes and shapes, four of them being in sets of twos? That implied two handed, one handed and dual wielding, all at once. And _six_ swords in one sword…

"You wouldn't be interested in having a spar, would you?" Angeal asked, trying _very_ hard not to sound breathless. Because a sword that size was a damn _rarity_. And Angeal hadn't been able to properly use the Buster Sword in… well. _Ever_. He just _couldn't_ because Genesis had a blade infused with materia which made it somewhat brittle and likely to shatter, and Sephiroth had a folded steel blade which would be bent to absolute ruin if Angeal had a proper swing at it with the Buster Sword. And the ShinRa issued broadswords? Before Angeal had realised how weak they were, he had broken them by the dozens with the Buster Sword.

These days he just didn't use the Buster Sword unless he absolutely had to – it was a fine sword but just a bit too powerful against anything that wasn't at least two inches of steel. Which meant pretty much _everything_.

The mechanic considered him and then licked his lips. "I'd love to," he then said. "Do you want to finish your maintenance? Because you're going to need another one by the time we're through."

"We'll see about that," Angeal grinned.

They had their fight in the train graveyard of the Sector Seven slums, which was big, empty and had a difficult enough terrain for a true spar. And it was a _glorious_ fight. Angeal had never felt that desperate need to find an equal that Sephiroth and Genesis both had – because he did most of his fighting by his fists and feet, he had plenty of equals out there. But now, with his sword meeting one that was not just equal in size but superior in strength – and a _swordsman_ who was a master in using said sword… he knew what they felt. It was the closest he had gotten to experiencing perfection.

Except for one thing. The mechanic _beat_ him, and pretty easily too.

"You're not very trained with your sword, huh?" the mechanic asked, while all but peeling Angeal off the side of one now thoroughly ruined shell of a train car.

"I don't get that many opportunities," Angeal admitted, wincing a little. "It tends to be a bit overkill to use it. And when I do use it, it usually doesn't last for long."

"Hm," the mechanic said, sheathing his beautiful mess of a sword before retrieving the Buster Sword where it had been flung from Angeal's hands. He examined the blade and then easily flipped it in his hands, holding it out to Angeal. "Well, if you decide to get more practice, you know where to find me."

"Yeah, I guess I do," Angeal murmured, accepting the blade. It did need another bit of maintenance – though thankfully, the blade wasn't chipped. "I don't even know your name," he then said. "I'm Angeal Hewley."

"Strife," the man answered, and they shook hands.

"Just Strife?" Angeal asked and the man shrugged. Well, fair enough, Angeal nodded and eyed his blade again. "I need your grinder again," he said and looked at the mechanic.

"After you," Strife motioned and they walked back to the Wall Market, talking almost passionately about the tactics of using a sword the size of theirs. It was a little humbling to realise that the mechanic knew more about the use of the Buster Sword than he did, but Angeal listened intently, fully intending to take the advice to heart.

The next time they fought, he lasted a little longer, but not much. The third time he lasted again a bit longer. By the fourth time, Strife stopped the spar half way through and instead began walking Angeal – who was a seasoned SOLDIER _First_ Class – through the proper thrusts and blocks. The fifth time, they spent the entire time practicing sword kata, rather than sparring.

The sixth time, Angeal was becoming _very_ suspicious about the man and his obvious skill and strength. Sure he had been suspicious before, but as time went on, the sheer _immensity_ of Strife's strength and knowledge became more and more obvious. After a while, Angeal began to wonder if Sephiroth too would've been reduced to student beside this man.

"I'm guessing you wear the goggles to hide the Mako shine?" Angeal finally asked, after another sequence of kata which was specifically designed for a sword of the Buster Sword's size.

Strife hesitated and then smiled wryly. "I'm not very subtle, am I?" he asked.

"You don't behave like a SOLDIER but there are only so many ways you could be this strong," Angeal shrugged and glanced at the other. "Was it illegal? The procedure?"

"No, not really, but… I suppose if ShinRa knew about my existence, it would be made illegal," Strife murmured, lowering his fusion sword. "That's why I don't make noise about myself."

Angeal nodded and held the Buster Sword up. A symbol of their family's honour and pride, his mother had said. He had wondered about the correlation between the Buster Sword and Strife's fusion blade. The similarity in shape was rather striking, when the fusion sword was fully assembled. Now he wondered where the Buster Sword had actually come from – where the shape had originated.

A man of Strife's sheer strength could've done a lot of damage if he wanted to. Instead, he lived quietly below the plate and kept mostly to himself, kept his eyes hidden. And Angeal knew half of the jobs he did around the shop were done free of charge for people who didn't have the means to pay. All weapons maintenance, including Angeal's own, was always free – and occasionally, when he had the time, Strife even _made_ weapons which he sold to those who needed them almost for nothing. With the rate that monsters spawned in the slums, everyone needed at least a blade, after all.

Honour and pride indeed.

"I won't tell anyone," Angeal said finally.

Strife glanced at him and then smiled before tugging the goggles down from his face, to hang around his neck. His eyes were blue, and intense with their unnatural glow. "I appreciate it," he said while Angeal, taken by surprise, stared at him.

The man was _beautiful_.

"What?" Strife asked, running his hand through his blond hair, pulling it back from his face and letting even more light into his already shining eyes and _that_ didn't help at all.

Angeal looked away, blinking rapidly as the hours spent alone with the man, the comfortable talks they'd had while sparring and while at the shop, the long periods of comfortable silence in between, the exhilaration of finding someone who was equal – superior – to him in his preferred sword art… all of it compiled on top of each other and suddenly he yearned in a way he never had.

For a moment, Angeal was tempted to take off and as quickly as possible. But damn it, he was twenty one, a SOLDIER First Class, not a nervous teenager with his first crush. And he hadn't gotten anywhere in life by being a coward and holding back.

"Angeal?" Strife asked, frowning.

"I rather want to kiss you right now," Angeal admitted and frowned. That hadn't come out right.

Strife blinked, his glowing blue eyes widening a little. He looked away for a moment and Angeal could see him _blushing_ rather endearingly.

"Sorry," Angeal said, awkward. "I don't know where that came from. I really do though," he added and laughed a little. "I've enjoyed sparring and spending time with you more than I enjoy spending time with my fellow SOLDIERs," he admitted while Strife turned back to him, growing even redder. "You understand me in ways no one ever had. I didn't even realise how nice that could be before. And it's not just the swords but the mind-set too – you're a good man. Maybe one of the best I –"

Strife, even _redder_ now _,_ let out a sigh and strode over. Before Angeal could brace himself for a blow or a shove or even being told off, the man pinned him against the side of a half collapsed train car, and kissed him almost angrily.

"Shut up," Strife said after the rather awkward kiss while Angeal blinked at him in surprise.

"You don't take compliments well, do you?" Angeal asked, breathless. Then, almost mischievously, he smiled. "All that strength and you get flustered when someone pays you compliments? You really are endearing; you're almost _charming_. And very attractive too and your eyes are _very_ –"

Looking almost furiously embarrassed, Strife silenced him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	15. Knocking on Hell's Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by bite-size-fox: Gaia sends Cloud back in time but miscalculates. Cloud wakes up in Angeal’s bed and Angeal is convinced they had a one night stand  
> (Cloud/Angeal)

Angeal woke up with a naked body in his arms, and a headache pounding against his temples. Groaning, he pressed his face against the warm skin just in front of it and willed the world to go away – and to take the headache with it. Of course, it was only fitting that he'd drink himself into a stupor in celebration for making it to First Class. Still… he did not care for hangovers, not in the least.

It took a moment for his mind to circle back to the fact that _there was a naked body in his arms_ , and the fact that he only knew it was naked because he could feel every naked inch of it against every naked inch of himself. With a frown, he opened his eyes, and came face to face with the nape of someone's neck and spiky blond hair, and the shell of an ear, adorned by a hole for an earring.

The man in his arms – because Angeal had a hand on his chest and even while hangover he could tell the difference between a breast and a pectoral – let out a soft sigh and shifted – and then froze, waking up.

"Um," Angeal said, just as the man turned sharply and elbowed him in the side. "Ow," he added, and then froze too as he came face to face with the other man – his rather beautiful face, and a pair of shockingly blue eyes, wide with shock and glowing with Mako.

"Hi?" Angeal offered and then realised that he was pretty much feeling the guy up and quickly removed his hand. Though at this point that was a bit of a moot point, seeing as they were _naked_ in a _bed_.

"How the hell…?" the blond SOLDIER murmured, shifting back a bit and then pausing and glancing down – and apparently realising their situation. He blinked, steeled himself and then looked at Angeal again, a bit more closely than before. "Um. Hello," he said, about as eloquent as Angeal's greeting had been.

"You remember about as much as I do, huh?" Angeal asked, a little amused. "Which is to say, nothing?"

"I remember someone telling me I was… angsting too much?" the blond SOLDIER said, frowning and lifting a hand to rub it over his face and run it through his hair. "And they'd… fix it?"

"Hmm," Angeal hummed, his eyes trailing downwards. The man was slighter in frame than he was, but well-toned – and every move he made was a thing of beauty, even when viewed from such an awkward angle. "I'd say they succeeded," he said and he _had to_ trail a hand over the man's side, the dip of his waist between the ribs and hip being entirely too tempting. The man was built solid beneath his skin, firm all the way down to the navel and Angeal was at the man's lower hipbone before he realised the liberties his hand was taking.

"Um," he said again, but didn't remove his hand – couldn't stop trailing the well-defined abs with his thumb.

The blond man swallowed audibly, glancing down at the hand and then back to Angeal. There was a hint of red on his pale cheeks and the contrast between the blush and the sky blue eyes was _stunning_. "Um," the man said, and Angeal just had to kiss him.

He didn't stop kissing him until an hour and a half later, gasping and panting while the blond man stretched himself out on top of him with all the understated strength of a predator at rest. "God bless SOLDIER stamina," Angeal murmured, a little hazy. God bless SOLDIER healing factor too and SOLDIER _strength_ because damn, the blond had to be at least twenty centimetres shorter than him but that didn't seem to slow him down.

"Mm-hmm," the blond said, all but purring where he rested, cheek against Angeal's chest, hips between his lazily splayed knees. "You got a bathroom here?"

"Somewhere," Angeal made a haphazard motion towards said bathroom. "You're not going to move after that, are you?" he then asked, less a question and more a complaint because he was rather comfortable with the other man's weight on him.

The blond chuckled quietly and got up, Angeal following his every step out of the room with appreciative eyes.

He dozed off for a bit there, in a sated post sex haze, trusting that their time so far had been pleasant enough that the other SOLDIER wouldn't just up and leave without at least leaving a name and number first – though he still couldn't remember much of the night before. Well, it didn't matter. Whatever memories he had lost, they'd just been remade, right?

When he came to again, the blond man was sitting on the edge of the bed. He had a frown on his face.

"Something wrong?" Angeal asked.

The blond jerked with surprise and glanced at him. There was an odd look about his eyes – a bit of fear maybe, and confusion. "I seem to be a bit misplaced," the man admitted. "I have… no idea how I'm here, but I really shouldn't be."

Angeal frowned and sat up. "You're not stationed in Midgar?" he asked.

The other SOLDIER snorted humourlessly at that. "It's a bit more serious than that," he murmured, running his hands through his spiky blond hair – and that didn't stop looking _very good_. Angeal smothered the urge to run his hands over the man's sides and chest to feel the stretch and tension of muscle and instead kept his hands to himself.

"Undercover?" he asked, a bit dubious.

The other man shook his head. "Something like that, I guess," he said and looked away. "I'm… kind of completely fucked."

Angeal had to almost bodily drag his mind out of the gutter at that. He shook his head and shifted a bit closer, running a comforting hand down the tense spine – and if his hand took a slower, more lingering path to stroke the muscles there, well. "Can't you contact your superiors, to try and explain?"

That brought out a laugh – a choked, mirthless sound. "I kind of can't," he said, not looking at Angeal. "I don't really have any. I don't…. I don't _exist_."

Well that sounded like a company cover up. Angeal would've bet a month's pay that the man he had just spent a _very nice_ morning with was actually _dead in the line of duty_ or some other crap like that. He knew stuff like that happened to Turks often enough – though he hadn't ever heard of it being done to SOLDIERs. They weren't very good at being undercover – the eyes gave them away, every time.

Angeal considered it silently for a moment, resting his chin on the other man's shoulder. "Are you on a mission?" he then asked.

"No," the blond answered, sighing. "No missions, no duties, just…"

Just that he _didn't exist_. Angeal nodded slowly. "If you've been off the grid and don't have a superior officer left," he said slowly. "What stops you from just coming back to SOLDIER and resuming active duty?" he asked and his hands wound around the man's waist because… well, because it was just there, and it felt nice. "Who knows about you? I mean, the higher-ups. If you come back… would they stop you?"

The blond man was quiet for a moment before sagging against Angeal's chest. "It's not that easy," he murmured.

"It could be. Cover up of a cover up – the company is full of them," Angeal said, running his lips along the man's neck. It was dry now, but still tasted salty and delicious. "I could speak to Lazard for you – and if anyone could fit you back into the rosters and make it seem like nothing out of the ordinary, it'd be him."

The blond man hummed. "Maybe," he said. "There are some things that I need to do. It would make things easier…" he trailed away, and touched Angeal's arms around his waist. "Maybe," he said again.

"Maybe," Angeal repeated and smiled against the warm skin. "Maybe _later_ ," he added, and hauled the man back and properly into the bed.

The man let out a quiet breath like a laugh and flipped Angeal over onto his back. "Who are you anyway?" he asked, amused, while Angeal took the opportunity to palm his hips greedily.

"Angeal Hewley, SOLDIER First Class as of yesterday. A _pleasure_ to make your acquaintance," Angeal grinned, shifting the smaller man backwards a little, to line their bodies a bit better. "You?"

"Strife," the blond man answered. "First name pending," he added somewhat amusedly. " _Nice_ to meet you too."

Angeal laughed, and reached up for a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Tsuyu


	16. Goes Around, Comes Around

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by xardogn: cloud/vincent same age, attending the same school. may or may not know who each other is.

After a few centuries, one stopped sweating about the decades. For Cloud it had taken about fifteen centuries before he stopped caring.... By the time he is something like three thousand years old, he stops more or less sweating about the centuries either and when people ask him how old he is he… well, actually, he never answers them, immortality isn't something you spread around. But he thinks "three thousand" rather than "three thousand, two hundred and fifty nine."

Time starts sort of blurring together like that, when enough of it passes by. The older he gets, the faster years go by – not that he minds it. It would've been goddamn tedious if every year had been as long as they used to be, when he was young.

There was a scientific study about that, about human perception of time, which he had read at some point in his lifetime – something about memories shortening the years. Kids, with little memories, tended to experience years being longer because they had so many new things to experience and not that much backlog holding them back. A year is a long time, when you've only had two or three of them so far. Adults, with decades of experiences and memories behind them, felt years were shorter because when you have thirty or forty of them, well, one more isn't that big of a deal.

And to think all those horror romance writers of his youth, writing about vampires and how immortality would be so long and miserable and grey and dull. Hah. All he had to do was to blink and oops, are we celebrating round numbers again, what year is it now, five thousand five hundred?

It makes it damn hard to keep track of things though. He tries to keep up with the news and whatnot – he even took part in special events once in a while. He used to be there when Wutai's emperors or empresses were crowned, he was there when new Eastern presidents were voted for… Hell, he was even enlisted in all four global wars. He was there when Valhal, the first commercial space station, was opened.

But even those start blurring into each other. There are now days something like forty space stations, the planet had four space _colonies_ and the big evil corporations, once upon a time fighting on the planet's surface, now fight over the best asteroids of the Middle Belt, all in hopes of getting the best mining opportunities. Wutai, he thinks, doesn't have an imperial family anymore. Hell, is Wutai even a thing? It might've been absorbed into the Western Federation at some point.

The best – and, well, the only – way to make time slow down even a little bit, is to step back away from those three thousand and then some years, brush it all off… and head to school. Nothing makes time slow down quite like spending some of it in a classroom. Cloud enrols in academies, universities, colleges and whatnot once every now and then, about once in a century – usually selecting what he will study and where by pinning it all on a wall and throwing knives at it. Whatever the knife lands on, that's what he'll study.

And that's how he somehow ends up studying Stellar Architecture and Design at the OrbitalSpaceAcademy on board the Highwind, the biggest space station currently hovering above the planet. He's still trying to figure out what the hell _Stellar Architecture_ is when he's on his way up there on the mag-lev space elevator, vaguely recalling a time when the only way to get to space had been by rockets and by burning literally thousands of galleons of fuel.

"Well that's a new one," a voice comments from behind and Cloud looks up from the pad he had been reading.

There's a man sitting in the seat behind his, vaguely familiar looking. It takes Cloud a moment to place the red eyes and the pale skin – most people are sort of caramel coloured these days, so it kinda sticks out. It's the hand that tips him off. Three thousand years, and Vincent still has to wear a prosthetic.

"You're still alive?" Cloud asks, surprised. It's been, what… almost half a millennia since he saw the man the last time? It had been somewhere in the East and there had been a war – and they had been on different sides. That had been a memorable little century. Cloud shakes his head at the memory. "Hey, Vincent. Long time no see."

"I could say the same to you," Vincent answers, single eyebrow arched before he leans in and plucks the pad from Cloud's fingers. "Study of sustainable design and architecture in space," he comments. "Doesn't seem like your field."

"I picked at random," Cloud answers, frowning and then blinks at the identical pad sitting in Vincent's lap. He reaches over the backrest of his chair and takes it, not entirely surprised to see the OSA's logo at the top. "Huh," he murmured, leafing through the digital pages of Vincent's roster. "Biology?"

Vincent shrugs. "I'm going for a medical degree, biology seemed like good way to start."

"Huh," Cloud answered, eying the introduction to astral biology. "What is _with_ these subject names these days," he mutters. "Stellar architecture and astral biology. I think the space age as gone in this generation's head."

"Entirely possible," Vincent answers calmly and hands him his pad back before looking at him. "Still going strong, is it?" he asks then, glancing him up and down. "Your eyes don't glow anymore."

"I'm wearing contact lenses again, since the glowing eyes aren't really in fashion anymore, they tend to stand out. The Mako hasn't run out and I don't think it ever will, to be honest," Cloud shrugs, putting his pad away. "You?"

"The same," the man nods, his lips curling into a smile. "Though red eyes _are_ in fashion, so I haven't bothered to try and cover hem. As it is, people always assume I'm either genetically altered or wearing contacts anyway."

"Hm," Cloud nodded, not sure what else to say. Long time or no, very little tends to change in their lives, and they'd been doing pretty much the same for the past… really fucking long time. You could rehash the same pleasantries only so many times over the eons before they got boring. "Well. I guess we'll be seeing each other a bit more, if we'll be in same school. In the same _space station_."

"Guess we will," Vincent murmured, and smiled faintly. "Should be interesting."

Having Vincent around would probably do nothing to help with the fast passage of time – if anything, he'd make the time go faster. It usually did, whenever they happened to land in the same place in time – if they didn't end up fighting, they'd end up fucking out of sheer, ancient frustration. But hell.

At least it would make the years memorable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Proofread by Darlene


	17. Cheap Pleasures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by kyaksa: amusement  
> (Cloud/Tseng)

Tseng had taken to visiting the Seventh Heaven in his off time. Originally it had been mostly to keep an eye on AVALANCHE – which, he had to admit, had worked better than he would've expected, considering that they _knew_ why he was there. He had, however, given up on being subtle on that score. It somehow never seemed to work on these people – and somehow they seemed to appreciate that, which somehow led them to welcoming him and letting him observe?

He would never understand these people who had somehow saved the planet. Their actions rarely, if ever, are logical.

After a while his visits to the Seventh Heaven lost their original purpose, however. AVALANCHE was all but decommissioned now, with their purpose fulfilled, their task done – the Planet saved, both from Sephiroth and Jenova, and from ShinRa. With all that said and done, none of them seemed inclined to cause any trouble for anyone – indeed, Tseng had never met people more inclined to lead quiet lives. Except, perhaps, Princess Kisaragi and Cid Highwind, the first of whom was naturally a public figure with Wutai's independence restored, and the second was making his entrances and exits in such high fashion by piloting the world's fastest airships.

The rest preferred not to make noise about themselves. Even Reeve Tuesti, with his WRO project and his megaphone toting robotic avatar, preferred to go about things quietly. For some of them it wasn't that big of a surprise – Valentine was one of the quietest men Tseng had ever met, the beast Nanaki was a natural observer and a quiet character all together, Wallace while boisterous had very modest goals with the AVALANCHE’s mission complete, and Lockhart's goal in life seemed to be limited to running a happy house of happier drunkards. And Strife…

Strife, it seemed, was perfectly content with the world if there was just one person somewhere who was smiling.

That had taken Tseng longer than he'd like to admit to figure out. Strife was a contradictory character, even outside his personality issues. He was quiet, almost aloof, didn't initiate contact unless it was absolutely necessary – he _never_ seemed happy, let alone content. For a while Tseng had wondered if the man had depression, but dismissed it. Withdrawn the man was, yes, and distanced from others, and obviously he preferred quiet to any sort of noise – except, perhaps, the roar of a motorcycle. But he didn't lack energy, he wasn't lethargic or unwilling – far from it.

The man never seemed to sit still. And perhaps it could've been contributed to him running a delivery business, but Tseng was rather certain that the man would've been moving even without an actual reason to. Strife was a natural wanderer.

"I think so too," Tifa said, when Tseng offhandedly made this observation out loud. "I thought at first that he just felt homeless, but he was like that as a kid too. Couldn't sit still."

"He doesn't look like it at all," Tseng commented. No, Strife looked and felt like a man who was so deeply rooted to the ground beneath his feet that he was _a part of it_. There was something… solid in Strife's presence these days. The man felt like a mountain, like nothing could shake him – and only in part because of his strength.

"No, he doesn't, does he?" she laughed. "But you learn with Cloud that he doesn't show things on his face, or voice, or actions. You need to look at his eyes to see how he's feeling."

That, Tseng found, was almost frighteningly true. Strife had almost as many expressions as Valentine – which was to say, _none_. But his eyes were overwhelmingly expressive. Maybe it was the Mako shine that made it all so obvious, but everything, even the smallest emotion, shone right out of them, broadcast in glowing contrast against the otherwise blank, pale face.

When Strife felt confused, it was almost painful to look at his eyes – the _hopelessness_ of the confusion was so vivid. When he was sad his eyes contained oceans of unshed tears, glimmering just beneath the surface – and no one could look at him for too long, not even Valentine had the fortitude. When Strife was satisfied, his eyes gleamed like well-wrought steel, strong and proud. And when he was happy, his eyes glowed even harder than normal, and Tseng thought of Costa del Sol, of sun, of the deep blue sky – the warmth.

The last wasn't as rare as Tseng had occasionally thought. The warmth was there when Tifa joked with Reno, as she laughed uproariously at his awful jokes. It was there when Wallace and Highwind got into their heads to have a spontaneous arm wrestling match. It was there while Kisaragi tried – and failed – to get at Valentine’s material, and whenever Cait Sith played tricks for the children of Edge. It was there when the boy Denzel ran up to Strife, demanding a sword lesson. It was there, always, for Marlene Wallace, no matter what she did.

Strife was almost overwhelmingly happy _all the time_. And it hardly ever showed.

"You could've made a decent Turk," Tseng said to the man, once, after long hours of observing the lack of facial expressions, and the shine of the man's eyes. Strife didn't so much as twitch at the words, but he was surprised and it shone out of his eyes, making Tseng smile. "Don't be surprised," he said. "You've got a poker face to kill for."

"I don't know about that," Strife said, looking away.

The most amusing thing about the whole thing was – Strife really believed that. His face was all but carved from stone, but he had no idea. That too shone out of his eyes – the man's constant worry of that weakness, of being _obvious_ with his emotions and expressions. Possibly some lingering effect of childhood, when he had been more expressive – and gotten tormented for it by his peers. And so the man half self-trained himself out of expressions and now all he had to do was put on a pair of sunglasses and he became a blank wall. And he didn't even realise it.

Tseng smiled – partially because he _could_ and partially because he wanted to show the expression to Strife. And, like always, the happiness shone out of the man's eyes – suspicious happiness, Strife still hadn't gotten over Tseng being an enemy before, but happiness regardless.

It was like a light switch. Smile at the man, and he _glowed_.

These days Tseng smiled a lot more than he used to.


	18. Outsider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by yizukikhons: How about Cloud is raised in Wutai and only goes to Midgar when it’s overthrown by Shinra? He and Tseng can bond over their culture.

"Just in time," Veld said as Tseng stepped into the observatory. The Director of the Turks didn't look away from the two way mirror he was looking at. He just motioned at the other to come closer. "Come here – meet your new assignment."

Tseng arched an eyebrow and stepped closer. The room was one of the trainer observatories, where the two way mirror showed a training room beyond it – SOLDIER used it to assess their recruits and newer members without letting the said trainees know. It wasn't usual for Veld to hand assignments in such a place – it wasn't usual for Veld to even make an appearance on the SOLDIER floors all together, never mind assigning missions.

Then Tseng saw the scene beyond the window and it started making sense. There were two people there. Sephiroth, with his long hair and leather coat, was easy enough to recognise, but the other one was an anomaly. And it wasn't just that he was unknown to Tseng.

Fourteen to sixteen in age, blond haired, blue eyed, pale skinned, and wearing _Wutaian_ clothing. The sort of trousers that were tugged into the man's footwear that’s common among Wutai soldiers, a sleeveless vest lined with an almost artistic line of buttons in the front, with layered shoulder guards on each shoulder. It wasn't just the clothing either – but the fact that he wore them with obvious ease, not even noticing them – like he had never worn anything else in his life.

Narrowing his eyes, Tseng spent a moment to take in the details – the long blond hair tied up in a high ponytail, the gauntlets – but a lack of gloves. The _swords_. Six of them in total, with a katana and a wakizashi on each side of his hips and two _massive_ zanbatou on his back, one longer than the other, which also had a slightly thicker blade.

The young man, whoever he was, wasn't a Wutai native – but he had been raised in Wutai, Tseng would bet a month's pay on it. And then… then there was what he was _doing_.

He was standing a few steps behind Sephiroth, watching the SOLDIER First Class go through a sequence of katas with his nodachi. Every now and then the blond would say something and Sephiroth would redo a move. He was _teaching_ Sephiroth the Wutaian sword katas.

So, a Wutaian – and a _Wutaian_ soldier at that – and yet here he was, in the training room with _Sephiroth_ , teaching the SOLDIER secret sword arts of Wutai. And, for some reason, he had even been given lease to carry _six swords_ with him! And all while ShinRa still waged war on Wutai soil.

"Sir?" Tseng finally asked, unable to make sense of the scene.

"Meet Cloud Strife," Veld said. "You know that Genesis' forces recently took the Ziteng fortress?"

"I heard about it," Tseng nodded. "The siege was unusually short and they met with little opposition, wasn't it?""And here's the reason," Veld said and handed a folder to Tseng. "By the time Genesis made it into the fortress, about ninety percent of the people inside were already dead – by the hands of this young fellow."

Frowning, Tseng opened the file and was met with a series of photographs of the Wutaian fortress, apparently taken by one of the ShinRa infantrymen. They showed a lot of confusion about the neatly cut bodies littering the fortress grounds – something like fifty, maybe even a hundred soldiers, all of them efficiently cut down. And then, at the bottom of the stack, a neat line of bodies in the garb of Wutaian nobility – among them lord Guang, the master of the fortress, and one of Wutai's most highly prized generals.

And then one photograph of the young man training Sephiroth. He was depicted sitting on his knees in front of the line of nobles, with the six swords lined in front of him.

"That's how they found it. The only people who survived the massacre were just servants, some stable staff, no one else," Veld said. "Genesis didn't know what to make of it – Strife is obviously not a Wutai native, but he was trained by them. And yet he killed them. Genesis didn't know whether he should kill the man or reward him – so he sent him here, with the most recent returnees."

Tseng nodded slowly. "Has he explained his actions?"

"Only told Genesis that lord Guang betrayed his trust," Veld said. "He offered to surrender himself, or even to fight Genesis and die in battle."

"Hmmm," Tseng nodded. "And it will be my job to figure out what is going on with him?" Him, a Wutai native raised by ShinRa, investigating an Eastern native, raised by Wutai. How… ironic.

"Yes. You are the only one in the company who has enough insight in this sort of matters. Determine if he's a risk or an asset," Veld nodded. "I trust you know what to do and how to proceed. Genesis permitted him to carry his swords, and Sephiroth let him keep them when he took charge of him – we'll have to continue in the same line. For now, he's shown no inclination of attacking or harming anyone, but only time will tell if that will hold."

Tseng nodded again. "Anything else sir?" he asked. He wanted to get into the training room, to hear what Strife was saying to Sephiroth.

"I trust you know how to deal with him, if it proves necessary?" Veld asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Good. I'll leave you to it, then."

When Tseng got into the training room itself, Strife had drawn one of his own swords – the longer zanbatou – and was in the process of showing the proper way of holding the blade. Sephiroth, despite having used his nodachi for years now, had no formal training in the Wutai sword styles and apparently didn't hold the sword quite right.

"Turk?" the silver haired SOLDIER asked, when Tseng stepped closer.

"I've been given charge of your companion," Tseng said and bowed his head to Strife. "I am Tseng of the Turks, I'll be assessing your threat level," he added, having decided that his approach to the matter would have to be absolute honesty – it was a unique situation from both side, after all, and he didn't want to stir the water more than he had to.

Strife eyed him for a moment before swinging the sword to his side, blade behind him, and bowed back. "Cloud Strife, at your service. I trust you will take good care of me," he said.

Tseng straightened and nodded. "I don't mean to interrupt your training – I only wanted to introduce myself. Please, continue."

Sephiroth scowled at him, but Strife merely nodded and went back to explaining the differences between holding a long handled sword one way or the other. Tseng stepped back to watch them, making mental notes of how the young man moved, how he spoke, how he behaved.

He had been trained by samurai, Tseng decided. He wasn't just a swordsman – but a swords master, an obviously highly talented and highly trained one. But despite the training by samurai, he hadn't trained as one of them – he didn't behave right, he didn't move right, he didn't talk right. He didn't behave like a normal foot soldier either, though. No, he talked more like a servant – an important, well trained servant, but a servant nonetheless.

It was all there, the way he stepped aside, made himself both present but unobtrusive. He spoke politely and slightly deferentially to Sephiroth, and when the SOLDIER glanced at him, Strife's eyes always dropped to avoid eye contact.

He called Sephiroth _lord_ , which was somewhat concerning.

Eventually Sephiroth seemed satisfied with the advice he had received. With a few exchanged pleasantries, Sephiroth left with a slight, awkward bow, leaving Tseng alone with Strife.

"You are not an Eastern native," Strife said, turning to Tseng and looking at him curiously.

"And you're not a Wutaian native," Tseng answered calmly. "The situation is unique on both sides – that's why I was assigned to your case, because of my… insight into the matter."

Strife nodded, resting his hands idly on the handles of his twin katana. He did and didn't look very formidable – he was young, slight in build, short and would always be more beautiful than handsome in appearance. But there was lithe strength in his bare arms, and having seen the man handle the zanbatou with such ease, Tseng knew that his appearance was rather deceiving.

"I suppose I must tell my story, eventually," Strife said. "And if I don't, I will always be watched."

Tseng smiled faintly. "You will be watched regardless, until you prove yourself to be friend or foe," he said truthfully. "But knowing what motivated you to massacre the forces of Ziteng fortress would help there."

Strife considered it. "Is there a place to get Sake?" he then asked. "It's not a tale I want to tell while perfectly sober."

Tseng took him below the plate of Midgar, to the ramshackle Little Wutai in the sector four slums. The residents there were mostly Wutaian immigrants, who had strived to bring some of their culture with them, which gave their part of the slums a rather unique appearance. And among those vaguely Wutaian styled buildings, there were more than enough bars that served proper sake. Strife ordered his at room temperature and drank three cups in a row before he began.

"My mother moved to Wutai shortly after I was born – she didn't tell me why but I got the impression that she was hiding away from somebody, and Wutai was, somehow, the best place to hide," he said. "She was an engineer and a mechanic – she worked on one of the Mako reactors twenty years ago, though she wouldn't tell me which one. Back then, Wutai had a different… atmosphere, and she was more welcomed there than she would be these days."

Strife's mother had been taken in by Lord Guang, to live in the Ziteng fortress as Guang's personal engineer. She, it turned out, was the original creator of the signature gun-spear of the Wutai foot soldiers – she had made the prototypes over ten years ago. She was also the reason why some places in Wutai – like the Ziteng fortress – enjoyed the luxury of electricity.

"I was raised in Ziteng fortress – my mother wanted me to learn from her and become an engineer like her, but I was more interested in… other things," Strife said. "Lord Guang was amused by it, and let me train with his private guard – I started when I was seven. By the time I was twelve, I was put in charge of training some of the troops in Ziteng. It was… good enough work."

Tseng nodded thoughtfully. No doubt lord Guang had just sought to amuse himself by letting Strife train – except Strife had proved to be a prodigy. There was no way to make a samurai or a soldier out of Strife, though, not with his ancestry. "And the betrayal?" Tseng asked quietly. "You said to Commander Rhapsodos that lord Guang betrayed your trust."

Strife scowled and ordered more sake before continuing. "Ever since the war started, things began changing. Naturally, war is the greatest motivator of change – but things changed for me and my mother on a more personal level. After all, we weren't native to Wutai, a fact which was always obvious to anyone who saw us," he said, motioning at his blond hair. "At the beginning, no one said anything. But as the war wore on, people became… resentful of us, for being Eastern by birth."

"Ah," Tseng murmured, starting to get it. A lot of Easterners who had used to live in Wutai had had to flee the country, to avoid retribution of the natives. More had been outright killed by Wutaians.

"I was sent to a nearby camp, to give additional training to an infiltration squad," Strife murmured. "When I came back… someone had slit my mother's throat in her sleep. Lord Guang wouldn't investigate – instead, he had me imprisoned for demanding it, for… inciting turmoil and for disloyalty. For treason."

"You got out, obviously," Tseng said.

Strife smiled faintly. "He ordered me killed for false charges," he said quietly. "He gave me the choice to either be beheaded or to do the honourable thing myself. And then he showed me my mother's body – and I decided on a third option."

Tseng nodded thoughtfully, turning his own sake cup in hand. Betrayed loyalty was a terrible thing, especially in Wutai. He himself hadn't really received much of Wutai's culture – he had been only seven when ShinRa had… adopted him. But he could understand. The way he had been _trained_ to be loyal to ShinRa, Strife had learned to be loyal to Wutai and to lord Guang. And when that loyalty had been betrayed… Well, in Wutai, loyalty and honour were quite a bit more important than they were in the East.

It made Tseng sometimes worry what he himself would do, should ShinRa betray his trust. Something very similar.

"Thank you for sharing your story with me," he said.

Strife nodded and finished his sake. "And yours?" he asked.

Tseng considered how to answer and then shook his head. "I'm from the Bishui islands," he said. "Which were taken in the first year of the war by ShinRa. My family was killed in the first bombardment. I was saved by a ShinRa employee – a Turk – who took me under his wing. I have been with the company since then."

It hadn't been an act of kindness or mercy – just the cold calculation of a man who could see the war ahead of them. It had been for reasons like this – and for infiltration missions, which Tseng did plenty on Wutai's soil. He was given leave to keep up with his _culture_ and _traditions_ , to entertain a certain level of foreignness; he was even encouraged to practice the religions of Wutai – all in order to make him a successful infiltration agent.

Tseng _was_ a successful infiltration agent, true enough. But he had made damn sure to be more than just that – because he had known, right from the start, that eventually the war would end, and they wouldn't need any more spies to sneak behind the lines. Only time would tell how successful he had been.

Strife considered him silently for a while and then poured them both a drink. "To outsiders," he said, holding his cup up.

Tseng smiled. "To outsiders," he agreed, and they drank.


	19. Express

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by the-cocky-bitch: Tsengs gets to Cloud before he gets in SOLDIER program and convinces him his department is better then recruits him for the Turks

Taking the train was not Tseng's favourite way to travel. He preferred the efficiency and freedom of helicopters, and of course the autonomy of being in control of his travel vehicle. The speed didn't hurt either. Even cars felt limited and slow in comparison – and trains? It was like being reduced to travelling by _snail_.

Sadly, the company couldn't spare helicopter rides for every Turk and every mission, especially not a _lone_ Turk on a task that had taken him a mere hour to complete and required next to no leg work. So he was stuck on a train, on his way back to Midgar from Junon to report mission success to Veld.

Well, it could've been worse. It could've been the Midgar Metro. At least the Junon-Midgar Express was clean, well maintained, had comfortable seats, and people could generally expect not to be molested by random ruffians – and almost everyone on the train was quiet too, minding their own business, a lot of them napping or reading to pass the time.

Tseng had a seat near the back of the car, not as close to the exit as he would've liked, but the emergency hammer to break the windows was within his field of vision and he had his weapons, so he felt confident enough – and he could see most of the other passengers in the car from his vantage point. They gave him a wide berth, naturally – the dark blue Turk suit had driven them back from their allotted seats near him to the empty ones further away. Which is how he preferred it.

There was one who hadn't cleared off. Just across from Tseng, there was a young man – a teenager really – who was stretched across two seats and had been asleep since Tseng had gotten on board, with a duffle bag behind his neck and a travel worn coat slung over himself. He hadn't so much as stirred since the journey had begun, an hour or so ago, sleeping right through the start, the adding of the vehicle bearing cars, and not even budging when the other passengers had retreated, leaving Tseng – and the young traveller – in a bubble of isolation.

Tseng passed time deducing the young man. He wasn't an Easterner, that was obvious. He was too pale, his blond hair too natural, and he wore none of the clothing trends one could find in the East. Instead, he wore cargo pants, travel boots, a sleeveless vest – and the coat slung over him was handmade from leather that was patterned with scales.

He wasn't Northern either – the clothing again was wrong. Plus, there’s the handmade coat. After some time eying the seams and the stitching, the way the leather behaved when the teenager shifted in his sleep, he decided that it wasn't Midgar Zolom skin. Nor any other snake skin he knew. Idly, Tseng ran a litany of all the reptile and snake-like monsters he knew, and one by one dismissed all of them. The colouring and the pattern were wrong – and, judging by the shade, the coat material had all come from one single beast.

And if it wasn't Midgar Zolom, then it was a dragon. And there was only one place on the entire planet where there were dragons. In the mountain range between RocketTown and Nibelheim. And, judging by the teenager's clothing, he came from the latter rather than the former. The general wear and tear of the teenager's clothing supported the theory – he had been travelling a lot in the last weeks, nonstop and often off road – which was how the majority of travel in the Western Continent happened, the roads there being in poor repair.

Nibelheimer, so far from home – and travelling alone too. How curious.

Too bored to bother to stop himself, Tseng leaned in to have a better look at the young traveller. He didn't seem to have any weapons, unless he had a concealed firearm or blade hidden under the coat. What he did have was a set of heavily bruised, scar ridden knuckles on the hands he was resting on his stomach. Rather like the teenager had been fist fighting recently – and mostly against things harder than his fists. Maybe even all the way through from Nibelheim to Costa del Sol where he would've gotten to Junon by boat, and then to this train… to head to Midgar.

A SOLDIER candidate then.

Leaning back again, his curiosity sated, Tseng turned to the window. SOLDIER had a lot of applicants these days. Thanks to the likes of Sephiroth and Genesis, every boy from Mideel to the Northern Crater wanted to be a SOLDIER. Something like five hundred of them tried applying for the SOLDIER corps every year. About twenty of them make it, if even that.

This kid wouldn't make it. Fighting his way through the Western Continent was impressive, yes, but he was of slight built, and rather short. SOLDIERs in general were large – tall and heavy and riddled with muscles, even _before_ they had their treatments. The Nibelheimer didn't stand a chance.

It was impressive though that he was trying – that he had managed to come so far. The monster population of the West was high and wild and of a higher level than in the East – and if Tseng was right, this kid had gotten through them by _punching_ them. Not a very subtle tactic, but if it was effective against the high level monsters of the West – not to mention Nibelheim itself, which was not a kind place by any means…

And the kid had a coat made of dragon hide. Considering the sort of places those back water western towns could be… there was a high possibility that the kid had both killed the dragon, and made the coat – all by himself. People in the West generally faced worse hardships than those in the East, where living was made easier by ShinRa's presence. They fought greater monsters and battled worse odds. In Nibelheim, wearing dragon hide clothing might be part of the norm. In the East, though?

You had to pay thousands for even a scrap of clothing-worthy dragon hide – not to mention about decent length coats like this one.

Tseng glanced back at the kid, eying the coat thoughtfully before concentrating on the teenager himself. He had long blond hair and a sort of androgynous face – change his clothing, and he'd pass for a girl easily. Aside from that he looked… weak, unassuming. Harmless. And rather cute too.

All of which were features an undercover Turk would _kill_ for.

Drumming on the hand rest of his seat, Tseng considered the kid before checking his PHS for the time. The train had been in motion for an hour and twenty minutes – which left eight more hours to go before they reached Midgar.

It wouldn't be easy, not if the kid was really determined, and he probably was, considering that he had crossed continents alone and fought monsters bare handed just for the opportunity of trying to become a SOLDIER. That was the sort of hard headedness that made excellent SOLDIERs, sadly enough. Tseng had worked with worse odds, though. And there was enough time.

With that decided, Tseng put his phone away and began plotting out a recruitment pitch.


	20. Unit Unfit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by for-world-domination: Cloud is an A.I. given to the Turks department (because Cait Sith = C.S. = Cloud Strife? I don’t even know)  
> (Cloud/Tseng)

"You are NOT naming me Cait Sith!" the android snapped while Reeve considered him. "You call EVERYTHING Cait Sith and I, I'll have you know, _am not a cat_!"

"But it's such a good name," Reeve said, a bit amused. Like with the Cait Sith models, he had let the android's personality shape itself, and it had turned out rather vehement. It fit the spiky blond hair and defiant face rather well. "Adding a set of cat ears and tail wouldn't be that hard –"

"And that would make the whole point of making me as human as possible completely moot! No Cait Sith," the android said, pointing a finger at him. "I will _kick_ you if you try it. And my bones are _titanium_. It will hurt like hell!"

"So it would. Fine, no Cait Sith," Reeve said, shaking his head. "Name yourself then, but I draw the line at CS initials. You are of the same series, after all – it's only proper."

The android grimaced, casting a look at one of the Cait Sith robots which sat on a nearby table. It stuck out its cat tongue at him and he flipped a finger at it. "Same series as them, my ass," he muttered and folded his arms, considering it. "CS, CS… hm. I think… Cloud. And Strife. Cloud Strife."

"How is that any better than Cait Sith?" Reeve asked, amused. "You're just picking words at random, aren't you? Did you find them through a random selection algorithm?"

"So what if I did? At least they mean something!" the android, Cloud, snapped. "You know what, I am going to kick you anyway. Stay still for a moment –"

Cloud was a prototype, a robot unlike anything that had ever been seen on the Planet – and Reeve, when he wasn't being kicked by him, was rather proud of him. With a titanium alloy skeleton, wrapped in carbon nanotube muscles, covered in a layer of synthetic skin, a small Mako Cell for a heart, two powerful cooling systems for lungs and a whole array of processors for guts, Cloud was a work of art. Cloud's data processing and storing capabilities were in a whole different stratosphere in comparison to even the best of supercomputers ShinRa had ever developed, and his programming was as close to divine perfection as Reeve could get.

He was perfect.

He was also something of a schizophrenic. The problem with letting the personality programming write itself – it almost completely rewrote all but the base personality on a daily basis. On the outside it seemed like Cloud was highly moody – one day he could be cheerful and helpful and kind, and another he could spend in sulking silence. Sometimes he behaved like a kid, other times like an old man. He went from talkative to mean to menacing and then to easily frightened, quiet, shy, distanced. Sometimes he acted like a complete spazz, entertaining ridiculous notions. Sometimes he was an idiot. Sometimes he was a down right _asshole_.

One memorable day he ventured out of Reeve's office and came back wearing a _dress_.

"That assistant of yours is a bit strange," Veld, the Director of Turks, commented. "Does he get any actual work done?"

"Yeah, ignore that. He has a social experiment thing going on," Reeve said smoothly. Cloud had taken to making paper planes that day – and had somehow ended up making Wutaian origami. Last Reeve had seen him, he had made a full set of origami characters for the LOVELESS play. The office was probably littered with the paper models by now.

"He's actually very efficient. He simply… gets easily bored," Reeve added. That was probably the best way of putting it.

"Uhhuh," Veld said, shaking his head and holding out a folder for him. "I have a favour to ask. One of my Turks needs a bit more office experience. Would you mind terribly taking him on for a while?"

Reeve lifted an eyebrow and accepted the file. Tseng was the Turk's name – he was rather young, but his mission scores were off the chart. "Turks need office experience now?"

"Their Director does," Veld shrugged. "Tseng's showing a lot of promise and I think he has the potential of one day taking over my branch of the company – and to do that he'll need to know how the other branches operate, and how to interact with them in their environment, which largely means in an office setting. This is the best place for him to get some first-hand experience."

Reeve considered it. He would prefer not – Cloud was his secret for now, and having a Turk poking around wasn't conducive to keeping secrets. But on the other hand… Veld was a friend. And Cloud had been terribly bored – it might make him less inclined to kick Reeve, if he had someone else around to bother.

"Alright. Send him over, I'll see what I can do with him," Reeve said. "How long will I have him?"

"As long as it takes for him to learn – which in Tseng's case is never that long," Veld said. "I'd be surprised if he didn't have the whole thing down to pat in a couple of weeks or less."

Tseng was a quiet, polite and very vaguely sardonic young man – and Cloud, naturally, hated him at first sight. Tseng took the initial hostility from Reeve's primary _assistant_ in good grace, looking like he was settling in to bear it through the whole internship ordeal.

And then, naturally, Cloud changed the next day – and took the poor Turk completely by surprise by greeting him cheerfully instead of growling like he had the previous day. Reeve watched the baffled look on Tseng's face through the security cameras and had a small chuckle as Cloud more or less steamrolled him with an overabundance of cheerful curiosity, asking about anything and everything that had to do with Turks.

"Is he… quite alright?" Tseng asked on the fourth day, after four different moods – angry, curious, morose, and confident, a rather heavy array of Cloud-Modes to go through in such a short period of time.

"Cloud? He's… sort of bipolar," Reeve shrugged. Bipolar, completely mad, same thing. "His bark is worse than his bite, though, so don't worry about it." Not strictly speaking true – with his artificial muscles, Cloud was about as strong as an industrial level compression machine. And about as easy to destroy as a wrecking ball. "He's not violent," Reeve amended. He had yet to add any sort of combat capabilities to Cloud, anyway.

"Bipolar?" Tseng murmured. "Why do you have a bipolar assistant? There must be hundreds of better candidates out there." He sounded more curious than anything, though.

"No, there aren't. Cloud is _highly_ efficient. Just watch him," Reeve said, smiling. "He might whine or cry or rage about the work and he might occasionally stab the paperwork with a penknife, but he's a good assistant. Just ignore him if he's in a mood that doesn't agree with you, and leave him be."

Tseng _didn't_ leave Cloud be. After another day of observation, Tseng began to not so subtly needle at Cloud, changing approaches depending on what mood the android was in. One day, he and Cloud spent most of the afternoon competing on who could get most goals by throwing paper balls into a trash can. Another they spent throwing insults over the floor space – at some point dipping from Eastern to Wutaian. Another day they played chess, Cloud at first losing several matches in rapid succession, but then getting better as he analysed the game. By the end of the day, Tseng was reduced to forfeiting within fifty moves.

"A bipolar genius, hm? Where did you find him?" Tseng asked curiously.

"In a bar," Reeve shrugged. The idea of making Cloud had come from a bar – in a glass of beer, in fact. Cait Sith on the other hand had been a Scotch shot invention.

 It brought up a good point, though – Cloud needed a background. After a moment of considering it, Reeve placed Cloud on the Western Continent, in a small backwater town called Nibelheim. Cloud spent the night downloading everything ShinRa had on Nibelheim and the next day, he came to work with a stack of books on genetic engineering, bio-grafting and retroviruses.

"Now what?" Reeve asked curiously, peering at the books.

"Just a bit of interesting stuff from home," Cloud said with an evil grin and for the rest of the day, he was something of an evil genius. It was… actually rather disturbing. Reeve made a mental note not to download information into Cloud again, at least, not an entire _town's_ worth. Nibelheim, it turned out, had some rather disturbing skeletons in its closet.

But thankfully, the next day Cloud was in a different mood again. He spent the whole day _flirting_ with Tseng who bore it first with calm amusement – and then, sometime around noon, started to flirt back. A couple of hours later, Reeve had to take Cloud aside to give him The Talk – which, sadly, for an android wasn't mortifying enough to bring any sort of embarrassment out of Cloud.

"So, I _can_?" Cloud asked thoughtfully. "I wondered about that."

"I made you very lifelike," Reeve said modestly. "It won't be as good for you as for your partner, though – I still don't know how to make a robot feel pleasure, I'm afraid. But you can imitate all the physical reactions."

"I can, huh?" Cloud said, and promptly kicked him in the shin. "You, sir, are a pervert," he said, and sauntered over to Tseng. Reeve rubbed at his abused leg with a wince and waved a dismissive hand at the stupid android, leaving him to his fate.

The next time Reeve saw them, Cloud was kissing the poor Turk silly – and judging by the helpless blush and the way Tseng just _hung_ onto him, Cloud had been at it for a while too.

Reeve sighed, and decided to close the office early that day. Depending on what mood Cloud is in the following day, Reeve might have to take Tseng aside for a little talk – if Cloud got it into his circuits to pursue a _relationship_ , then Tseng deserved to know the truth.

And if Reeve would be assembling a high explosive device while give said talk to Tseng, well. Cloud _was_ his baby, he had every right to do the dad-thing – no matter what the android himself would say about it.


	21. Perfect Timing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by rahmakapala: A timetravel mishap lands AC Cloud to Vincent’s youth. It a chance to save to world, but doing it with least mess requires some seduction.  
> (Cloud/Vincent)

"Aerith, you suck," Cloud informed the Ancient who hadn't yet even been conceived, sighing at the newspaper he was looking at. She had told him she'd send him to his own childhood, to Nibelheim, where he was, actually, in the best position to ensure the most changes. She had only gotten the _Nibelheim_ portion right. The timing…

The year was 1979. _Six years_ before he would be born. And while he had thought he'd end up in his own younger body and do his whole youth again, he had ended up instead as himself, in all his twenty nine year old glory – which, thanks to Hojo and Mako and all that, basically meant he still looked like he was barely eighteen. And okay, that wasn't as bad as it could've been – he hadn't _really_ been looking forward to going through his teenage years again. But still.

Aerith sucked. Whether she had made a mistake or this was on purpose or something, _she sucked_. Bad.

Sighing, Cloud looked up and to the Nibelheim Inn's keeper, who was eyeing him somewhat suspiciously. Cloud ignored the man with a shake of his head and turned back to the newspaper.

Well, he mused while eyeing the front cover. There was something good about this, maybe. A bit. If one looked at it while drunk and squinting. ShinRa wasn't yet a global power. Midgar was in its infancy, with barely the foundations laid out, and ShinRa itself was, while a powerful company, not the world dominating one it would grow to become. There were still _governments_ around. They were corrupted, bribed to high heavens by the likes of ShinRa, but they were still, technically, in control of their various corners of the world. Midgar still had an actual powerful mayor who was captured by the newspaper, giving some speech.

If ShinRa is destroyed now… it wouldn't mean the sort of utter collapse of society that would ensue, twenty five or thirty years from now, when it would actually happen. There was still some infrastructure that wasn't purely supplied by ShinRa.

"Hey there, handsome. No good news today?" A female voice asked and, blinking, Cloud looked up from the newspaper. There was a woman in a dark blue suit, standing over him, smiling at him. She had short red hair, looked vaguely familiar – except not – and she was _leering_ down at him.

Behind her, there were three other Turks, one of them, judging by the looks of it, ordering drinks while the other two talked quietly between themselves. All of them were giving Cloud not so subtle sidelong looks – probably because of the swords on his back, the fusion sword having made the transition with him in one – in six – piece, thank _somebody_.

"No, the world is wrought with sadness and misery and we're all doomed," Cloud answered solemnly, and she grinned.

"You local?" the woman asked, not so subtly leaning down while pinning her elbows down against her sides. Her suit jacket and shirt were open rather far down and the move exposed the rather fine curves of her chest.

Cloud arched an eyebrow at her cleavage and then looked up to her eyes. She really looked familiar. Looked like somebody. "Just stopping by, is all," he said and leaned back a little and tried to remember how well known the Turks were in this time. In the future _everyone_ knew what the Turks did, but here he wasn't so sure. Should he play along, or…?

"Where are you from, then, handsome?" she asked, leaning in a bit further.

Cloud blinked and leaned back a little more. "Lady, mind taking those things out of my face?" he asked almost plaintively.

She blinked and then pouted. "What, you don't like them?" she asked, tugging at her collar.

"They're a very fine example of female endowment, I'm sure. But they're completely wasted on me, I'm afraid," Cloud said, laughing a little, thinking for a moment of Tifa and their rather disastrous attempts of being a couple and oh god, hadn't _that_ been embarrassing. "Sorry. Female isn't my thing."

"Oh, pity," she said and sighed disappointedly and straightened up, pulling her coat straight and hiding most of her admirable cleavage. "There aren't that many good looking guys around here," she said as a way of explaining. "Girl's gotta try, you know."

"I know, and I'm sure you're absolutely lovely. But I'd be totally useless, it would just be embarrassing for both of us," Cloud laughed and glanced at the other Turks – who had gotten a table very near to his. "Your… friends don't seem to be so bad looking," he commented.

"Yeah, well. Number one's taken, number two's taken, and number three's sort of gloomy. Also, I work with them and that'd be just weird," she said, giving the other Turks annoyed looks before glancing at him. "You might have a chance with the gloomy guy, though," she said then, grinning a little. "I'm not a hundred percent sure here, first time working with him, but he has that feel to him."

"Gloomy, huh?" Cloud answered and she nodded at one of them – a man with short black hair that fell half in his face and a gun strapped to his side. The man shifted a little, running fingers through his hair and pushing it back a little, revealing a pale but handsome face, high cheekbones, a straight nose…

And red eyes.

"Pretty, isn't he?" the Turk woman asked, leaning in. "Kinda aloof and a bit hard to talk to, but damn easy on the eyes."

"Yeah," Cloud said, trying not to choke on the words. "Yes he is." He looked a bit weird, out of red and in a Turk suit – and with _short hair_! But it was definitely Vincent. Vincent sans the golden claw and the boots and the experiments and the monsters. Vincent who was actually the age he looked, now.

He had always been easy on the eyes, it turns out. A little easier now that he wasn't covering most of his face with a collar.

Obviously aware of their staring – and probably listening in too – Vincent glanced up, red eyes flashing in the dim light of the Inn hall, and then away again. There was a little bit of red on his cheek.

"Okay, which one of us made him blush?" Cloud asked, because he and the Turk woman were both staring at Vincent.

"You, definitely. Trust me – I've tried the entire time we've been here, and I haven't gotten a blink out of him," the woman laughed and leaned in a little. "Between you and me, he could use a bit of action. Might loosen him up," she added and Cloud almost choked on the air he was breathing. She grinned. "Want me to talk him into coming over?"

"Gaia, lady, you don't know the meaning of restraint, do you?" Cloud laughed.

"Me? Never!" she said, and held out a hand to him. "I'm Reina of the Turks. Nice to meet you."

"Cloud, and you too," he said, and shook her hand – and it hit him that she looked almost exactly like _Reno_. It took all his effort not to gape at the woman, as she grinned, winked at him and sauntered over to the other Turks, to lean over Vincent to talk with him in low tones.

Cloud knew, objectively, that they were probably just trying to squeeze information out of him. A swordsman with his array of weapons would raise suspicion, especially considering that at this time, Hojo and Lucrecia would be just starting with the whole Sephiroth and Jenova project… which actually might explain the Turks' presence in the town. That was probably why Reina had come over – to seduce him into revealing his secrets.

Oh man, did that mean she was going to make _Vincent_ try and seduce him into revealing his secrets?

Cloud looked away and covered his mouth with his hand, trying not to laugh hysterically at the mental image of Vincent seducing someone. Then he thought about it a little more. Vincent – seducing someone… actually, Vincent wouldn't really have to work that hard at it, would he? This younger Vincent might be a bit different, but the older Vincent? All _he_ had to do was look at someone and they fell over themselves. Damn the man and his vampire allure.

After getting his mirth under control, Cloud turned to look at the Turks again, just in time to see Vincent standing up. He didn't quite have the fluid grace of his older version, but there was that odd, stiff elegance that Vincent had always had. This younger version walked a little prouder though – not quite as withdrawn or aloof as the older one. Not yet broken, Cloud mused, eyeing him. More confident, than disinterested.

It was a good look on him. Cloud didn't know how he liked the shorter hair and it was weird seeing Vincent in anything but red, but… he looked good. Healthier, definitely, than the older version.

He was also coming right at Cloud, with a half determined, half exasperated look on his face – and a hint of red on his cheeks. _That_ was a good look on him too.

Maybe being stuck six years before the right time wasn't so bad. And who knows, he might even be able to do more good here, from this time, than from the future. Snip ShinRa in the bud, as it were. And with Sephiroth and the Jenova project just starting in Nibelheim… he _was_ in the perfect place to deal with about three or four birds with one stone.

Destroying Jenova here would be easy. Killing Hojo, easier. Sephiroth… well, the world would be better off if he was never born. And as a result of all that, Vincent would never have monsters in his guts. It would be a win all around.

"Hey," Cloud greeted Vincent when the man came close enough. He smiled, giving the man a slow once over. No one had ever made a blue suit look quite so good. "So. Want a drink?"


	22. All for none

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by frznlights: What if Tseng had discovered Valentine early only to be imprisoned with Valentine in the mansion? When Zach wakes, he’s not the only one…?

Zack left Cloud in the mansion bathroom, under the running water, while he himself headed to find them something to wear. Thankfully, there hadn't been that much staff in the mansion – just a few scientists and a couple of guards, all easily enough taken out – and he could wander around freely.

"Whatever they were doing, I guess we're not that high on the list of priorities anymore," Zack murmured, running a hand through his hair. He still felt hazy around the edges and he was desperate to find the Buster Sword, if it even _was_ here. For all he knew, it might've gone into the Mako pools of the Nibelheim Reactor with Sephiroth, but he had to… he had to check, had to find it.

It was all he had left of Angeal.

He found some random bits of clothing and pulled on a pair of ill-fitting trousers, leaving the rest in the corridor to take to Cloud, before heading back down to the labs – maybe there'd be a weapons locker or something. He had only barely glanced at the labs before and he didn't really feel like having a closer look, but right then… he needed to be thorough.

He and Cloud were all alone – he needed every bit of advantage. Potions, materia, anything would be better than nothing.

He didn't find a weapons locker, but he found a hidden room. It took him a couple of hours to figure out how to get the fake wall to open – it took a code and everything – but he had the time and managed it eventually. Only to find that the room was filled with… coffins. Just coffins. Cautiously, Zack poked around the room, not really wanting anything to do with _coffins_ – who knew what the scientists had stuffed into them? But while there was even the slightest chance that there might be something useful there…

The first coffin contained something that might've been a human being, twenty years ago – there was only a skeleton with some borderline mummified bits of flesh and half rotten clothing on it. The second coffin had nothing, though it looked like it had – like whatever had been there had rotted right through the lining. The third…

At the third he was met with a gun barrel.

"Who?" the man holding the gun demanded to know. He was black haired, red eyed and had a golden talon in place of a left hand. "Who are you?" the man demanded.

"Ah, _Gaia_ ," Zack cursed. "I'm Zack Fair, SOLDIER – ah, well, ex-SOLDIER, I guess. Escaped specimen now. Mind pointing that thing somewhere else? I'm not gonna attack, don't even have a weapon or anything."

The gun man stared at him, red eyes gleaming. "Escaped," he then repeated, looking around them. "Where's security?"

"There wasn't that much of it, really. A couple of guards, a few scientists," Zack shrugged and watched how the man _whirled_ up from the coffin. "Also, hi, hello, nice to meet you, how about a name?"

"There's someone else here," the gunman said, scowling at the room.

"Yeah, my buddy Cloud's upstairs," Zack said, shrugging. "He's got Mako addiction, he's not gonna do much."

"No, someone else," the other man said. "In this room. I remember him."

Zack blinked at that and then watched how the gunman opened coffins, revealing a lot of remains. "What is this place?" Zack asked, feeling a little ill at ease with the whole thing because, well. _Coffins_.

"Hojo's dumping ground," the gunman said. "Used to be the mansion's private catacomb before ShinRa bought the mansion. Hence the coffins."

"Lovely," Zack said, scratching his hair and the gunman opened another coffin, to reveal something that wasn't just remains. It was a body.

A familiar body.

"What the hell?" Zack asked, coming forward. The clothing was different, the hair was loose and a scar ran down the middle of the man's forehead where the Tilak had been, but it was him. "Tseng?!" Zack gasped. "What's he doing here – is he, is he dead?"

The gunman scowled, reaching out and touching Tseng's neck – only to have the Turk's eyes flash open and his hand snatch the one reaching for him.

"Tseng!" Zack said. "Oh my god, you're alive. How the hell?"

"Zack?" Tseng groaned, blinking – and the scar in the middle of his forehead gleamed red with fresh blood. "You're… but… how…" he stopped, sitting up with jerky motions and then stopped, gasping in pain as his forehead suddenly _opened_ , gushing blood.

"What's wrong with him?" Zack asked, horrified.

"Hojo, I imagine," the red cloaked gunman said. "Do you have any materia?"

"Haven't been able to find any," Zack admitted.

"Take him to your other friend," the gunman said, turning to leave. "I'll be there momentarily."

Confused and ill at ease, but very ready to get the hell out of the catacombs, Zack scooped Tseng up, ignoring the blood spilling across his shoulder and chest when Tseng slumped against him. Taking the spiral stairs up to the mansion three at a time, Zack carried the Turk to the bathroom, setting him down to sit beside Cloud who sat there, still under the spray of water, glowing blue eyes barely open.

"You're gonna be okay," Zack said, crouching down before the pair of them, the Mako addicted Cloud and profusely bleeding Tseng who was now clutching his forehead and groaning with pain. "Just hold on."

The red cloaked gunman took his sweet time appearing, but Zack forgave him when he did – because the man was carrying with him the Buster Sword, and a whole load of materia. One of them, thank god, was Restore, which the gunman fired up instantly and all but bathed Tseng with.

It took _four_ spells before the bleeding stopped. Zack had to pry Tseng's hands off the man's forehead to see the damage – only to find that it wasn't really a wound.

It was an eye. A third eye right in the middle of the man's forehead.

"I remember him," the gunman said, crouching down. "He must've been investigating the mansion, for some reason. He woke me up for a while – I told him about… about my time here."

"And?" Zack asked, leaning back from Tseng a bit. The third eye was eerie – green and slit-pupiled and terribly familiar. It didn't move though – Zack wasn't even sure if it could see anything. God, he hoped it couldn't see anything.

"We were discovered, and I think he was shot – I was put to sleep, so I don't know what happened," the gunman said, scowling. "But I can imagine. Hojo has the habit of shooting people, and then using them in his experiments."

Zack looked away, and at Cloud – who was listing where he sat, leaning towards Tseng. Zack made a move to stop him, but Tseng seemed to come to and reached to steady the infantryman himself.

"Cloud Strife?" he asked, confused. "And Zack. So you didn't die after all."

"You thought we did?" Zack asked.

"You were reported killed in line of duty. I had… suspicions," Tseng said, blinking blearily and touching his forehead – and then wincing and pulling his hand away. "It's still there, the thing he put in me. The eye. Isn't it?" he asked.

"Yeah, and it's really creepy too, man," Zack said. "Please tell me that's not Sephiroth's."

Tseng said nothing, just looked away and at Cloud. "He looks about as well off as I feel," he murmured, reaching to touch Cloud's cheek, tilting his head a bit to see the empty, glowing eyes. "Mako addiction?"

"Borderline poisoning, I would say," the gunman said, standing up and looking down on them, at Zack and Tseng and Cloud. He seemed to weigh his options before nodding. "Clean up, find some clothing and whatever food there is in the mansion," he said. "I'll acquire us a transport from the village."

With that said, he left.

"Who the hell is that guy?" Zack asked, confused.

"Vincent Valentine," Tseng said, sounding tired and feeble. "He was a Turk, like me, around the time Sephiroth was conceived. He… disagreed with Hojo. The same as I did."

"Man," Zack murmured, sighing. "This is messed up."

Tseng sighed, nodding and rested his temple against Cloud's forehead. "My head hurts," he complained tiredly, closing his eyes – his _real_ eyes anyway.

Zack was about to offer him another cure, when Cloud sighed and closed his eyes too, slumping against Tseng in a shivering, Mako addicted heap. Blinking, Zack looked at them, his blond trooper buddy and the black haired, pale Tseng, as they both seemed to just doze off right there and then, on the bathroom floor of ShinRa's Nightmare mansion.

If it hadn't been so fucked up, they would've almost looked cute.


	23. Arsenal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by araceil: If Cloud’s Mother had been a Turk once upon a time ago?

The first week after Cloud entered ShinRa, he was shadowed by shady men in blue suits. He endured it only for long enough to determine how many of them there were and that their intentions weren't at least currently hostile, before walking them into a dead end alley and taking them on, Strife style.

"So, you following me for a reason?" he asked the black haired Wutaian man with a Tilak, the red head man with a mag-rod, the bald black man, and the pretty red head woman, all of whom had been poisoned, paralysed, confused, blinded and were currently under the countdown of Death.

"I-I g-guess that an-answers whether y-you're rela-related to S-Skye Strife," the Wutaian man answered, slurring under the effects of poison and confuse, compiled on one another – which was rather like being drunk, hangover and having a head cold all at the same time. Cloud knew. He had felt worse.

"My mother," Cloud nodded, looking down at the Turks. "Are you guys gonna be a nuisance about it? Because I'm not here to join the Turks. My mother would literally kill me. And more than she usually does."

"I-I t-t-think we o-o-o-oughta l-leave t-th-this one alone b-b-boss," the redhead stammered.

"Yo-you're n-n-not going t-to le-leave t-th-that here?" the lone woman of the group asked, eyeing the Death with wild eyes.

"After you let me catch you this easy? You deserve it," Cloud snorted, got up. Then, considering the Turks, he shrugged and cast a Regen on them, making the Wutaian man relax a little and the redhead sigh with relief. "Next time I won't Regen you lot," he said and walked away whistling, leaving them to die – and be revived.

He was left alone through the SOLDIER candidate trials and his subsequent failure. The Wutaian man, Tseng, popped up once – at a distance, with a bangle full of materia held between them and Barrier, Reflect and Wall up just in case – to ask him if he was really sure about SOLDIER. Cloud showed him – like his mother had shown him – the failures of protective materia, and encased the man, protective shielding and all, in a clump of ice.

Tseng was lucky. When Cloud had done the same, his mother had collapsed the ground beneath his feet and encased him in _rock_.

He was left alone through the shift to the Infantry, where Cloud did his best to train his physical combat as well as magical – for which there were ridiculously few opportunities in the military, everything being all about firearms there. He made it to Private First Class before Tseng very, very tentatively approached him again, about a mission.

"As an infantryman!" the man hurried to assure from where he was standing, with two panes of bullet proof glass between them – they talked through phones, while Cloud glared at the man. "Just as an infantryman. I need someone who's used to the terrain and you're the only one I know who can handle it."

Cloud went to Modeoheim more out of boredom than any other reason – the mission ended up being a bit of a fuck up, starting from when Tseng crashed the helicopter and ending with one objective dead, the other missing, and the third… well. If there were any advantages to having captured Hollander now, Cloud didn't see them.

"What are they teaching you lot these days?" Cloud wondered to Tseng later, while they were making their way to BoneVillage – because thanks to Tseng, they no longer had a transport.

Tseng sighed. "Things were… more chaotic in your mother's time. We don't need that level of, uh… capability these days."

It almost made Cloud want to join the Turks – it would've been worth it, just for the chance to kick all their asses in legitimate training. He didn't, though. The wrath of Skye Strife was something one did not in any form or fashion try to invite, ever, for as long as one lived.

A few months – and a rather nice, though on Fair's side somewhat oblivious, friendship – later, Cloud was pushed into another SOLDIER related assignment. "I'm just a bit suspicious," Tseng admitted through the phone. "This sort of mission ought to have a Turk supervisor, seeing that it has to do with a Reactor, but someone high up said no."

"So I'm your Shoe-In Turk, huh?" Cloud asked. "Where is the mission?"

"Nibelheim."

Cloud considered it. It would be nice, to see Ma again. "I'm going to so kick your ass for this later," he said as a way of agreeing.

"Noted. I'll even bring some fresh recruits for you," the Turk answered and hung up.

The way back home was pleasant and awkward and much nicer than leaving had been – Skye had stripped him of all money, equipment, and materia and all but kicked him out, leaving him to fend for himself. Travelling by train, boat and truck made a much easier journey. And it was nice, not having to fight monsters bare handed or scavenge for food.

"How does it feel, to be home again?" Sephiroth asked.

"It's that sort of feeling like when you're watching a train wreck and can't do anything to prevent it," Cloud sighed. Thankfully, his mother hadn't gotten a wind of his arrival yet – so he wasn't greeted by bolts of lightning. Yet.

Even Zack looked confused about it, but he only shook his head and turned to Sephiroth. "How about you?" the SOLDIER asked.

Sephiroth frowned a little at that. "I wouldn't know," he admitted. "I don't have a home."

Later, Cloud left Zack and Sephiroth to the Inn and, steeling himself, went to meet his mother. He came back with a freshly baked pie, and a broken arm that took four cures to heal – but thankfully he managed to fix it without anyone noticing.

The next day, they went to the Reactor, and there was Genesis, who knocked Cloud and Tifa out and apparently Sephiroth then had a weird out moment. "Weird out moment?" Cloud asked Zack, after checking that his materia was still all there and that Genesis, the Materia Slut he was, hadn't stolen any.

"Yeah. Something about mothers and monster and whatnot. He's in the mansion now, being all… weird?" Zack sighed, scratching his hair.

Later, once Zack had fallen asleep, Cloud pinged his mother with a message that Sephiroth had probably gotten into the Laboratory beneath the mansion. Then he headed out, steeling himself for whatever was to follow.

"Why didn't Professor Gast tell me this?" Sephiroth was wondering when Cloud got there.

"Probably because Hojo killed him," Cloud said, making the SOLDIER whirl around. Cloud waved. "Sup. Wanna hear the story from people who were actually _there_ when all the shit went down?"

"Excuse me?" Sephiroth asked dangerously. A couple of minutes later, he was ranting about destiny and Ancients and the planet – and his _mother_ and how she had been cheated out of her chance to rule and all that. About how Cloud was an inferior dullard – which left Cloud taken aback a little because who the hell used a word like dullard?

Then Sephiroth was taken out by a scythe that came from nowhere which inflicted Instant Death on him.

Skye Strife stepped out of the shadows, hoisting the scythe to her shoulder as she looked down to the fallen SOLDIER. With a sigh, she rested her free hand on her apron adorned waist and glanced up at Cloud. "Go wake up the pretty boy, will you? I'll wrap this one up."

"Yes, Ma," Cloud nodded – almost saluted – and headed off to wake up Vincent.

"Please tell me she's not here?" were Vincent's first words upon waking up.

"Sorry man. She's in the lab," Cloud said, grinning a little. "But on a brighter note, she's more pissed off at me right now, and she's busy with Sephiroth, so maybe she won't knock you out for a few years this time."

Vincent sighed and looked at him. "Sephiroth?"

"Yeeah, he's having a Schizo episode in the lab. Or was. Ma knocked him out."

"Well _of course_ she did," Vincent murmured and got up with a sigh. "How's ShinRa treating you so far?" he asked as they headed to the lab.

"It's been kind of boring. Also, turns out I took out the top four active Turks in my first week in Midgar," Cloud added. "It was kind of sad."


	24. Hands off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by tsuyuhime: Vincent is very careful of his talon, but that control disappeared when he gets together with Cloud for the first time. Problem-solving time.  
> (Cloud/Vincent)

"Okay, that's… ow," Cloud complained, lifting his head. Flushing bright red with mortification, Vincent pulled his hands off of the swordsman's hair, horrified to find the tips of his talon red.

"Sorry," he panted out. "I didn't mean to – I am so –"

Grimacing, Cloud wiped at his lips before lifting his hand to his hair and rubbing at his scalp. His fingers came away wet and there was a hint of red in his otherwise blond hair, where the scratches Vincent had made were sluggishly bleeding.

"I'm so sorry," Vincent said, humiliated, and moved to get up. "This – this was a bad idea. I should –"

"Oh, shut up and lay back down, it's just a scratch," Cloud said, pushing him down with one hand while reaching for his clothes with the other. While Vincent watched, he pulled out his wrist band and slipped it on, running a faint Cure over his scalp. "There, all better," he said, ruffling at his blood stained hair.

Vincent grimaced, squeezing his hands into fists and holding them against the sheets. "I shouldn't have even…" he trailed away, shaking his head. "I'm sorry."

"Yes, yes, I got that. Shut up," Cloud said, but with an exasperated, fond smile, rather than actual annoyance. Shaking his head, the blond man shifted over him, settling himself comfortably into the space created by Vincent's uplifted knees. "We need to do something about that claw of yours, though, before you slice me into ribbons," he said, while running his slightly bloody hand through Vincent's hair and kissing him.

Still humiliated, Vincent forced himself to relax into the kiss, carefully keeping both hands off Cloud and his ample expanse of suddenly very vulnerable seeming skin. They separated with Cloud dragging his teeth against Vincent's lower lip and the gunman sighed. "Maybe I could wear a glove over it," he offered, self-conscious.

"You'd rip right through it in minutes, and you know it," Cloud hummed, shifting his body against Vincent's and reaching for the clawed hand. Vincent jerked a little, but let Cloud lift the hand up, making sure to keep the fist clenched and the fingertips against the metal covered palm. "I have an idea," the blond man said and lifted the hand up further, above Vincent's head, against the headboard of the bed. "I could tie it here."

Vincent blinked and looked up, to where Cloud was holding his wrist against the headboard. "T-tie it?" he asked and it came out as a surprised stutter.

The swordsman grinned, shifting against him in a languid roll. "Yeah, tie it. Wrap a belt around it and keep it _right here_ ," the blond man murmured, leaning in to breathe the words against Vincent's neck. "Keep you right here, right where I want you."

By themselves, Vincent's eyes fell shut and he inhaled shakily. When Cloud rolled against him next, he lifted his hips to follow the motion helplessly.

"Or," the swordsman murmured, his voice dropping an octave while his other hand took Vincent's human hand, and pinned it up as well. "I could tie them both down."

"Cloud –" Vincent breathed, shivering.

"And then I could do just what I wanted without any interruptions," Cloud continued, a smile in his voice and on his lips which he trailed down Vincent's cheek, to his jaw line, to his neck. "I think you'd like that. Letting me have my way with you."

Swallowing, Vincent opened his eyes and looked down to the blond man. It still startled him that Cloud wanted him at all. But this?

"Or would that be too heavy for a first time?" Cloud asked, not unkind, as he kissed his way down Vincent's neck and to his collarbone. "Hmm?"

Vincent swallowed again and jerked slightly as Cloud rolled against him, making his want rather obvious. And it wasn't like Vincent could hide his own, like this, with the other man pinning him down. "Yes, fine, do it," Vincent choked out, his hands clenching and unclenching where Cloud was keeping them against the headboard. "Just… do it quickly."

Cloud grinned and, because he could be an asshole when he wanted to, he didn't. Instead, he leaned forward and kissed Vincent within an inch of his life, without ever once releasing his hands, all the while thrusting slow and languid against the gunman.

Not that Vincent much minded, really.


	25. Making of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by celtichobbit: Cloud never leaves Nibelheim, he becomes an item/weapon/materia specialist instead, finds Vincent when raiding the mansion for new materials

Cloud finds his first piece of weaponry when he's four. It's a half rusted hand gun, out of bullets and in such bad shape that it takes him all afternoon, half of his mother's tool box, and about a full decilitre of oil to take it apart. He lays out each rusted piece in a neat line, the empty magazine, the rusted slide, the sear that almost snaps in half when he removes it, the pivot pin, the ejector pivot pin… Eventually, the whole rusted mess of a gun is in parts in front of him.

"Good," his mother nods, patting his shoulder. "It's absolutely worthless, but it's a start."

She is what the town calls a _scavenger_. The area of Nibelheim is absolutely littered with old weapons and equipment from the time when ShinRa had been mostly concentrated there, back when the Mt. Nibel Reactor had been the only one and the ShinRaMansion had been the company headquarters. Most townspeople tried to forget that time, or lament it as the worst time in their history, but not Cloud's mother.

She went around the town and the mansion and all the way up to the reactor, digging up forgotten tools and weapons, restoring them if she could and if she couldn't, selling them for parts of scrap metal. And once Cloud got old enough to learn that _safety first_ meant removing the magazine, checking it for bullets, and then sliding the clip back, he went with her.

He killed his first monster at age six, with a rifle made from the parts of seven different rifles. It was a very controlled event, him and his mother lying on their bellies on top of a rock, waiting for the monsters to go to the bait they had laid out, and then taking them out at a distance. She took out most of them, but he got one. She was very proud.

At age eight, Cloud fell off a bridge and broke his leg. He spent that summer in his mother's garage, learning the use of the power tools there. He made his first blade – a rough little knife – that summer, and put together his first hand gun. Of course, his mother wouldn't let him even try firing the hand gun – or even loading it. The action wasn't sound. But she let him not only keep the blade, but built him a training dummy, to learn how to use it.

He has been hooked ever since.

At age nine, Cloud had mastered the art of melting scrap metal down, refining it, tempering and hardening it, and making pretty decent swords-metal out of it. In the course of that year, he made twelve knives, and one sword that had a bent blade and atrocious balance, but by the time he was done with it on the grinder, it had an edge sharp enough to shave with.

As the years grew, the materials found around the Nibelheim area naturally dwindled. "It was bound to happen – hell, it's been happening for a while," his mother sighed while Cloud lamented the lack of proper iron. "There used to be so much stuff here, twenty years back. But these days… It's getting harder and harder to find."

Eventually, Cloud had to begrudgingly _order_ and _buy_ the metal for his craft. While Cloud and his mother sold what they made, it was never for much – there wasn't that much use for weapons in their town, aside from the occasional wolf hunting and monster killing, and with weaponless hand to hand combat being more popular in the area, swords weren't exactly in high demand. And neither were guns, really, not with the town's history with ShinRa. And trying to get metal from Nibelheim was borderline impossible anyway – it had to be ordered and that cost. It cost a _lot_.

At fourteen, while other boys were leaving town to find work elsewhere – mostly in Corel – Cloud turned his eyes to the ShinRa mansion. Empty for as long as he had lived, it was the only place left – outside the Reactor itself – that could still have something usable. He considered his options and the ever rising prices for iron and steel, the frustration of trying to melt down the ever poorer metal that they could find… and decided to go for it.

 He got his favourite pair of swords – one handed cleaver-like blades which he had learned to dual-wield – and a hand gun his mother had made from scrap parts, and headed to the mansion. The monsters there, having been allowed to breed in peace, were more numerous than up in the mountains, but Cloud and his Mother had once taken on a dragon in the hopes that they could make something out of the bones – they hadn't been able to, but the parts had sold for a pretty gil. So he wasn't worried, being perfectly capable of taking the little monsters head on, and the bigger monsters he weakened with controlled bursts of fire first.

He found lot of interesting and more not so interesting things in the mansion. A few weapons which he would take back to his mother – they were in better state than what they could find outdoors, that was for sure. He found that there was a secret sewer system leading from the mansion and the town up to the Reactor that no one knew about – but which explained a lot about how the Reactor had been built. And, eventually, he found the basement.

And Vincent Valentine who nearly took Cloud's head off for trying to loot him.

"Sorry, sorry. Though in my defence, it's not like anyone could expect you to be alive when you're hanging out in a catacomb and sleeping in a coffin," Cloud babbled, keeping his hands up until the gunman lowered the Quicksilver. Their introduction was awkward, to say the least.

"You're looting the mansion?" Vincent asked suspiciously.

"For metal," Cloud shrugged. "It's damn impossible to get any in Nibelheim without having to pay for it through the nose."

"Why?"

"To melt it down and make stuff from it, of course," Cloud said and drew one of his swords. "I made this, from some pipes, a wreck of a car I found in the forest, and what might've been a table."

Vincent didn't seem to know what to say to that. In the end, the man went back to sleep and Cloud went back to his looting, taking with him a lot of tools from the labs and a lot of the spare parts for the medical equipment they had hanging around there – none of which were exactly in mint condition, having been sitting down in a damp basement for so long, they had oxidised to the point of being useless to anyone. Except for someone who looked to melt them down.

In the following months, Cloud ventured to the mansion often, bit by bit stripping the place of anything useful. Sometimes Vincent was awake, sometimes the man followed him around silently, sometimes he didn't bother. It took almost a year before the man bothered to explain his situation – by then, they were so used to each other that Cloud didn't even think twice before inviting the man to _get the hell out of the mansion_.

"No, seriously. It can't be doing anything good to you, staying here," Cloud said. "Come on, I'll introduce you to mom. We've got a spare room."

His mother was suspicious at first – but then it turned out that Vincent had talent with weapons crafting and upgrading, and she melted instantly. Most of their firearms work went to Vincent, who at first slowly but then with growing confidence refined all their firearms, dismantled some to make better ones, and upgraded the whole lot.

"I kind of like the gathering part of the business more anyway," Cloud's mother shrugged and left "her boys" to it, to work on their respective weapons projects in her garage, Cloud making swords, Vincent guns.

"It's a little strange, to work after all this time," Vincent admitted while carefully putting together a sniper scope of all things.

"Bad strange?" Cloud asked while poking at the container of scrap metal he was melting.

"Just strange," Vincent answered. "It seems… small, in comparison to before. In comparison to being a Turk and in ShinRa's employment. But this is… not bad."

Cloud smiled. "I wanted to be SOLDIER, once," he admitted. "I wanted to do the whole shebang – go to Midgar, get myself recruited, be a big damn hero and all that."

"Why didn't you?"

The teenager shrugged. "I learned to make weapons and I learned how to use them. And I decided I liked the making part more," he said.

Vincent considered that, hummed in agreement, and they went back to work in comfortable silence.


	26. Quiet Moment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by yizukikhons: You're always doing Pre-FFVII stories. What about one where Cloud and Vincent don’t hook up until afterwards? One where He and Cloud end up sitting on top of the church and just talking. About the past, the future, regrets. Maybe they even kiss at the end. I dunno.

"So. Did you find your forgiveness?"

Cloud looked up at Vincent, who had at some point appeared to stand behind him. Shaking his head, Cloud turned back down, to the church below. Not much remained of the church – Kadaj and his crew had done a number on the place. The roof, what had remained of it, had collapsed and the walls would go soon too. Probably a good thing – this way the flowers would get more light.

"Maybe," Cloud answered finally, while Vincent crouched down beside him on what remained of the church's rooftop. "There are still things I need to sort out, but… they're mostly misconceptions, now."

"Hm," the gunman answered, looking down. People had been coming and going non-stop in the church, washing away their stigma in the water Aerith had created. Saving them all, even years after she died. "The battle wasn't it, I take it?"

Cloud smiled a little at that and looked up, to the sky. "It helped. Made me listen," he murmured. "Turns out you miss a lot, when you stop listening. And I've been deaf for a while now."

Vincent glanced at him and shook his head. "I don't think that would work for me."

"You never know, until you try," Cloud answered. "But maybe it's different for everybody."

They were quiet for a while. It was getting dark now, and there were fewer and fewer people coming. The ones who were there were filling bottles and buckets with the water, to take home with them to those who had been too sick and weak to make the trip.

"I've been thinking," Cloud said slowly. "About how this all will look like, in fifty years. In a hundred – in five hundred. Not just Midgar, but what we did here. Will people even remember?"

Vincent said nothing, glancing around them, to the ruins of Midgar. Some of the support structures still loomed above them, some bits and pieces of the plate hanging in the air, but mostly the city was falling quickly and brutally to ruin. Midgar, it turned out, hadn't been built to last.

"I keep imagining Midgar covered in grass, with vines growing all over the places. Trees, in place of streets," Cloud murmured. "Flowers everywhere. I kind of like the idea."

"You and I might live to see it," Vincent commented.

Cloud looked down at that, back at the pool, where the last people – a woman and a man, a couple – were filling a pair of jugs with the water. It was a heavy thought, to think they'd probably outlive the couple. Maybe even their children and grandchildren. It was harder to see on him, he was younger, but… they didn't age. Vincent, at the age of fifty nine, still looked below thirty. And probably always would. And Cloud, if you were really honest about it, didn't look a day over eighteen.

"We might," he admitted. "Terrifying thought."

"It's not so bad," Vincent commented and with a sigh swung to sit down completely, his feet hanging over the edge of the broken rooftop. "Things change and you're left behind, but you get used to it."

Cloud smiled. "They did have mobile phones in your time," he said. "I'm pretty sure they did."

"They did. But that was all they were. _Phones_ ," Vincent grumbled, and took out the phone Reeve had acquired for him. He turned it in his hand awkwardly, giving the camera a suspicious look and Cloud had to look away, to smother a laugh.

"Well, in thirty years’ time, we can compare notes on how difficult technology gets," the swordsman said, amused.

Vincent shook his head, still eyeing the phone. "I'll hold you to that," he said, quiet.

They were quiet for a moment, while the church below emptied and they were left alone. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear the hum of machinery – not the former hum of Midgar's air vents, but that of the awkward wind mills that stood not too far from Edge, supplying the ramshackle settlement with some power. Somewhere, a motor was running – a car maybe. But overall it was quiet. Edge usually was – there weren't that many vehicles around these days. No way to power them, unless they were specially made and didn't use Mako.

"About your misconceptions," Vincent said after a while. "What are they?"

Cloud sighed, leaning backwards until he was lying on his back on the church roof. "Do you know, I'm one of the richest men on the planet, right now?" he asked, making Vincent glance at him. "ShinRa's collapse took out most of the moneyed people," Cloud shrugged. "Their wealth was mostly in ShinRa after all. And that left us irregulars. Me, with my gambling, chocobos, selling my sword collection, not to mention about all the rest of the stuff I gathered while we were travelling. I own a mansion in Costa del Sol – never stayed there, though."

"Yet you live here," Vincent commented.

"Yeah," Cloud smiled. "I've collected these things, this wealth, and I don't even do anything with it."

"And that's a… misconception."

"Well, something like it," Cloud said. "I should do something with it all. It's doing nobody any good, just sitting there. Cid's thinking of starting a transport company – I might finance him. And there's Reeve and his WRO thing, maybe I'll give him a hand there. It's not much, but… It's time I do something."

Vincent hummed, looking at him for a moment. "I guess it would help some."

"I need to sit down and have a talk with Tifa too," Cloud murmured. "A real talk. She's… expecting things from me. And I won't be able to deliver. It's time we sort that out."

Vincent lifted an eyebrow at that and Cloud shrugged. "I'll still be there for her. And the kids. Denzel and Marlene," he murmured. "But it's time I stop lying to us both. I won't be _with_ her – I can't."

"Can't," Vincent repeated.

Cloud smiled bitterly. "I'm starting to remember things. Things I forgot because of… of what Hojo did. Maybe it's the time or the water – or maybe I'm just letting myself remember. Doesn't matter. I'm starting to figure out what I can and can't do and that? That I can't," he said and smiled wryly. "Not quite oriented right."

"Ah," Vincent said, looking away. "I had wondered."

"Oh?" Cloud asked, glancing at him.

"You have a certain mannerism to you, when it comes to women. When it comes to Tifa. You never looked at her the way most men do. Most of the time, you're awkward when she approaches you," Vincent answered. "You were the same with Aerith. Have been, with every woman I've seen you interact with."

Cloud lifted a single eyebrow at that and thought back. "I guess I was. It was a bit easier, when I still thought I was SOLDIER First Class, because Zack was a bit of a womaniser, but me…" he laughed quietly, shaking his head.

"And now?" Vincent answered, looking at him.

Cloud looked back, taking in the serious look in the red eyes. It was a pity that Vincent covered so much of his face – behind the collar, beneath the hair. He was a beautiful man. "I'm figuring it out," Cloud said and smiled, slow.

Vincent blinked at that and then looked away for a moment, thinking. Cloud closed his eyes for a moment, enjoying the warmth of the roof tiles where they were still heated by the sun's last rays. He was figuring out how to enjoy the little things more, and this… this wasn't bad at all.

"So, in your experience, sins can be forgiven," Vincent murmured.

"I think so, yeah," Cloud answered and opened his eyes. "But it only matters if you do it yourself, too. But I think you know that, already. You said it. That _you've_ never tried."

Vincent nodded, looking at the church for a moment before turning to him. "I did," he murmured, looking at him thoughtfully.

Smiling, Cloud sat up. "You and I, we will… probably live for a long time," he said. "It'll only be longer if we're miserable for most of it. Might as well enjoy our lives, such as they are. Don't you think?"

"Maybe," Vincent agreed. "I think it will take me a while longer, though, to… forgive myself."

Cloud smiled, reaching out and kissing the man's cool, pale lips. "Take your time," he said. "I can wait."


	27. Sewn Shut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by deviswitch: cloud is really smart and due boredom hes goes to the shinra mansion finds stuff about vin(someone still living?) and being curious/annoying

Vincent sat patiently still, while Cloud drew blood. He had known the young genius for the better part of five years now, but he would never get used to the way Cloud was. All of fifteen years of age, barely a meter and half tall, and with one of the most innocent, most _naïve_ faces Vincent had ever seen, and Cloud… beyond all of that.

The youth finished after drawing four phials worth, and swiftly pulled the needle out of Vincent's lone human arm, almost absently trailing a tiny hint of Cure over the puncture mark before taking the phials to the centrifuge, and setting the rotation.

"Do you think you'll be able to figure it out?" Vincent asked, rubbing at his arm before covering it up.

"I'm getting closer," Cloud said, not confident but factual, looking over Vincent thoughtfully. "It's not hibernation or brumation. The stasis you go into is too complete to be anything as simple as that… but it is biological somehow – I just need to figure out what's triggering it."

"If you could do it before I go under again, I'd appreciate it," Vincent murmured but with a smile. Cloud had been trying to figure out what sent him to sleep every year – without Cloud, he'd be sleeping right now. A couple of years back, the boy had cooked up a stimulant cocktail that woke Vincent up a few weeks into his usually months long stasis cycle – but he still couldn't make the stasis cycle stop. Every year, on the clock, Vincent just falls asleep – and would sleep for the whole of the following year, if not roused.

"It's probably why Hojo gave up on you originally," Cloud had mused once, while they were early into figuring the whole thing out. "You were part of his SOLDIER program, him exploring another potential avenue for it, but then you got the stasis cycle somewhere along the way and… well. What use is a SOLDIER who sleeps all year long?"

Which was not very comforting at all, but at least nowadays Vincent knew what had been done to him – and why. And Hojo might've given up on him, but Cloud was only starting, and he was making progress by leaps and bounds. He had even figured out a precise drug to keep the beasts contained until Vincent chose to call upon them.

"You're wasted in this place," Vincent commented, while Cloud turned to the old computer left in the laboratory when ShinRa had abandoned their research at the Nibelheim mansion.

"Better here than anywhere else, I think," Cloud answered, typing away. "Better here than at ShinRa."

True enough. At ShinRa, Cloud's genius would've been corrupted and turned to similar pursuits as the ones Hojo entertained. Vincent couldn't imagine Cloud conducting experiments like the sort Hojo delighted in but… then again, he hadn't imagined Lucrecia doing it either. And she had turned herself and her own baby into a human experiment project.

"Besides, this place gave me the best education possible," Cloud added, giving him a faint smile. "Trial by fire style. After all that I learned here, what could I possibly gain from leaving?"

Vincent shook his head at that and stood up. If the world was a better place, Cloud would be out there, making said world even better. But the world wasn't a good place and the rare good scientist that was Cloud Strife had to hide away, to avoid the world's darkness tainting his secret work.

Secret work which, often, involved Vincent himself – but he didn't mind. Cloud's methods were those of test and trial before clinical experimentation, and Vincent preferred that to what Hojo had done, definitely. But then again, a lot of things were.

"I wouldn't want to leave you here anyway – I'm only getting started with this stasis thing. I'm going to figure this out," Cloud said determinedly, and then glanced up, frowning. "You hear that?"

Vincent glanced up and listened. There were sounds coming from the mansion above. "Monsters again," he said and then frowned. "No, those are steps I think," he corrected himself and glanced at Cloud. "Have you been covering your tracks?"

"I use the sewers to get here – I don't go to the mansion at all, anymore," Cloud answered, standing up. "I did hear something about the Mayor calling ShinRa about the reactor and the power outs – something about monsters…"

They froze, as they heard the pathway down to the basement opening, and steps heading their way. Vincent frowned and quickly pulled out his Quicksilver, checking to see that he had bullets in the chamber.

"You should hide," he said to the young scientist but it was too late.

The doors to the laboratory were flung open and a man stood there, about as tall as Vincent, with long silver hair and a Wutaian blade in hand. On his waist, beneath the long black coat, he had a belt with the SOLDIER symbol embossed on it.

"I thought this place was abandoned," the man murmured, looking between Vincent in his red cape, and Cloud in his stolen lab coat.

"It is. We're sort of squatting," Cloud answered flippantly, turning his attention back to the computer and motioning towards the research library. "The files you're looking for are on the fourth shelf on the right side. Start with the Northern Excavation by Gast Faremis."

The silver haired man frowned and then walked past them.

"Cloud?" Vincent asked, frowning.

"Sephiroth," the young man explained, and began printing something. "Get the tranquilizers, will you? I have a feeling we might need them."


	28. Watch closely now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by reighost: Role reversal, Cloud becomes the Soldier trapped in the coffin and Vincent is the Turk who wakes him up.

"Just… don't step on Hojo's toes. And look… look after Zack, as much as you can," had been Tseng's vague orders, before Vincent had been sent to Nibelheim. Later, Vincent rather wishes he could've shaken something more out of his superior – or put a bullet through his forehead – because what happens in Nibelheim does not make an easy assignment.

He grows to loathe Hojo within the first week and the mansion within the month. It is obviously Hojo's personal playing ground and despite how the mansion above looks – quaint and calm and elegant, all perfectly normal – beneath it, the laboratories _radiate_ with the professor's sheer disregard of human life. It's not even malice or cruelty, it's just disinterested contempt of anything that might be even remotely ethical and that's even worse. And that disregard is plainly shown in everything the professor does.

Vincent, after the first few days, spends most of his guard duty in the hallways outside the laboratory – or up in the mansion, if he can manage it. The screaming… is a bit too much, even for a Turk.

Vincent knows why he was sent here though. Zack Fair, SOLDIER First Class who was now professor Hojo's main concern, had a lot of friends among the Turks. He had been made First around the time of the Mass Desertions, when a lot of SOLDIER missions had been handed over to the Turks, and as a direct result, Fair had worked a lot with a lot of Turks. Vincent, though, had been stationed elsewhere at the time, and had never come in direct contact with the man. Which gave him a certain emotional distance and made him capable of handling the assignment.

It must've looked very neat on Tseng's paperwork. It didn't feel so neat here, in Nibelheim, in this nightmare mansion where the SOLDIER's screams echoed day and night. But Vincent gritted his teeth and bore it, the same way he had borne the rest of his less than ethical assignments. Tseng had told him to watch out for Zack. Vincent couldn't do anything to help the SOLDIER, but at least he could do what he was told to – and report everything to Tseng. If and when the Director wanted something done… well, that'd be a bridge he'd cross when he got to it.

Time passed slowly, sluggishly, in the mansion. Eventually, Fair fell into a coma and stopped screaming, thank gods, but that only made the slow passing of time all the more grating. Vincent began wandering around the hallways of the basement then, to pass the time – making sure that Hojo was in the lab and not about to wander out, when he did so.

In his wanderings, he found some old rooms and chambers, figured out that the basement had probably been a mausoleum or maybe a catacomb before ShinRa had built their lab there. He wasn't all that surprised when he found a chamber full of coffins in the basement – nor was he particularly surprised to find the majority of those coffins full of monster remains. Hojo needed to dump his failed projects somewhere, after all.

Vincent examined all the coffins, until he came to the one that was occupied not by remains, but by a full body. A blond man, remarkably well preserved, lay there, wearing what looked like the old SOLDIER uniforms – when all of them had worn single piece jumpsuits, rather than what they wore today. It wasn't… quite right though. He also had a red scarf looped around his shoulders, snagged beneath the single shoulder guard he had on. His right hip had been covered by armour of some sort, held there by a complicated array of belts. His left hand, it seemed, had been amputated below the elbow and replaced by a… mechanical claw with a leather cover and golden talon sheaths on the fingers.

On his back, there was a single black leather wing, barely longer than his arm.

While Vincent examined the mechanical claw that had replaced the man's left hand, the claw twitched – and suddenly Vincent found it clasped around his throat. The hold was tight, but not so tight as to constrict his breathing, and Vincent almost had the time to reach for his gun, before the other hand, perfectly human, snagged his wrist.

"And who the hell are you?" the man from the coffin asked, opening his glowing blue eyes and staring at Vincent coldly from beneath blond bangs. When Vincent made a move to try and get his gun with his free hand, the talons around his throat tightened warningly and he let his arm fall slack to his side.

"V-Vincent Valentine," he choked out. "Of the Turks. I'm here on guard duty –"

"Guarding whom?" the blond man asked, the single wing flaring out behind him.

It was a mistake, Vincent _knew_ it was a mistake, but regardless he gasped, "Hojo, professor Hojo!" at the man. A split second later, he was released and left gasping on the coffin room floor – and the blond man was gone, the room echoing with the sound of a wing, beating.

By the time Vincent got to the laboratory, the blond man had found a large sword wrapped in gauze, and Hojo had been cut to pieces with it. Cursing, Vincent pulled out his gun and aimed it at the man, but the blond just stood there, making no other threatening movements – just looking down at the professor's shattered body. The other scientists, judging by the looks of things, had fled deeper into the hidden laboratories, in an attempt to get away – but the blond man made no move to follow them.

"Revenge isn't as sweet as one might think," the blond man commented and hoisted the gauze wrapped sword to his back, where it hooked onto a magnetic clamp. "Shoot me if you want, Turk. I'm done here."

"Why? Why did you kill the professor?" Vincent asked, though he could imagine very well the reason.

"For things that can't be undone now," the blond man said, glancing at him and then away, around the laboratory, at the Mako tank where Zack Fair hung. "Who's he?" he asked. "Another idiot who disagreed with the professor?"

"His name is Zack Fair – a SOLDIER First Class," Vincent answered, not entirely sure why, but feeling like it was better to keep the man talking – rather than using the sword. He wasn't sure how to put Fair's predicament into words, though. What Sephiroth had done, what Fair had done, the _reward_ he had gotten for his actions… "He… was injured in a fight against another SOLDIER. The professor…"

"Took over from there. I see," the blond man murmured and slashed out with the mechanical, clawed hand. The front of the Mako tank split open and Fair came tumbling down, landing in the blond man's waiting arms. The winged man hoisted the unconscious SOLDIER to his shoulder and turned to Vincent.

"Gonna shoot me?" the man asked, looking down at the Quicksilver in Vincent's hands.

After a moment of thought, Vincent put the gun away. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to run like hell," the blond man smiled darkly. "And as far as I can. And anyone that comes after me? I'll kill them."

Vincent swallowed, looking between the man, the unresponsive Fair and then at Hojo. Tseng's orders had been clear. Watch out for Zack. "What about those who come with you?" he asked.

"And why should I trust you?" the blond man asked, his glowing eyes narrowing.

"I'm not shooting you right now," Vincent offered.

The man considered it and then shook his head. "Whatever," he said, walking past Vincent. "You'll need to keep up – I am not stopping for you."

Vincent closed his eyes and took a breath. Then, after one glance at the broken body of one professor Hojo, he turned around and followed the winged man out of the basement and eventually, out of the mansion. He'd find a way to report back to Tseng, without the swordsman knowing. Somehow. And in the meanwhile?

He'd watch.


	29. Accidental baby acquisition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pre-hiatus prompt by bluebloodburning: Cloud and Sephiroth (not necessarily romantically or sexually), accidental baby acquisition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbetaed

"Hojo has gone insane," Sephiroth announced as he entered the joint offices of the three commanders – one of whom he, unfortunately enough, was.

"Again?" Genesis asked from where he was leafing through his copy of the LOVELESS. "That's what, third time of this month?  Though at this point I'm not sure if he can go insane at all – or any more than he already is," he paused and stroked a gloved finger over one page. "Or did he go _more_ insane than usually?"

Rolling his eyes, Angeal looked up to the silver haired SOLDIER. "What is it this time?" he asked sympathetically, knowing perfectly who got to experience the brunt of Hojo's bouts of increased insanity.

"I'm not sure I can say," Sephiroth said with a grimace which was somewhere between a frustrated scowl and somewhat mad grin. "But don't worry, you'll see _it_ soon enough for yourself. The… what's-his-name is bringing _it_ here soon."

"What?" Genesis asked, peering over his book. "Who is bringing what?"

"I don't know, I didn't catch his name," Sephiroth answered with a frustrated wave of his hand while he threw himself on one of the long couches which sat just beneath the windows. "I was too busy trying to run away from Hojo's crazy babbling. He was seriously creeping me out."

"Well, he must've, if it drives you to use a word like that," Angeal said with a confused blink and changed looks with Genesis. "But, just so we're clear, what ever _it_ is, it doesn't, I don't know… have tentacles or multiple arms or anything, or is likely to eat anyone?" he asked. Knowing Hojo, no one could put it pass anything his laboratories produced.

"Does it secrete poisonous gas; do I need to get the masks?" Genesis asked, closing his book with a frown.

"Probably from time to time," Sephiroth groaned, lying down on his back and covering his eyes with an arm. "It was also wailing like a fire alarm the last time I saw, so you might as well get the earplugs too. And a cage. Maybe some alcohol."

"Okay, now I _know_ this is bad," Genesis muttered. "Except I don't know if this is _making Sephiroth exaggerate everything because he's pissed off_ bad or actually _gas masks, ear plugs, cages, and alcohol_ bad."

Angeal just shrugged awkwardly and was about to suggest that they get some supplies, just in case, when the door hissed open. They both looked up, reaching for their swords in case whatever it was really did have tentacles, when they saw the young trooper who entered the office. Young, spiky haired, wide eyed trooper. Who, just so happened, was carrying in his arms what looked like a human baby.

A _silver haired_ human baby.

"Ooh," Angeal and Genesis breathed in unison, while Sephiroth let out a groan and turned his back to the office.

The blond trooper just blinked at them and then shifted the baby in his arms so that it was leaning onto one shoulder, and he could lift his other hand for a salute. "Ensign Cloud Strife, reporting for, uh… duty," he said, his eyes flickering towards Sephiroth and then the infant in his arms.

"Oh, this is _rich_ ," Genesis said, while Sephiroth groaned again.

"Um. At ease, ensign," Angeal said, somewhere between amusement and mortification for Sephiroth's sake. "Just so that we're clear, you were transferred to this office, correct?" the blond ensign nodded while wrapping his arms more comfortably around the child again. "And you're duties are to consist of…?"

"Taking care of the, uh… child," Strife answered, looking at the infant.

"This is _perfect_ ," Genesis grinned, edging closer to Sephiroth. "Your kid, eh? Sephiroth, you dog."

"It's a goddamned test tube baby," Sephiroth answered without moving. He looked rather like he wanted to curl himself into a foetal position and wrap his infamous cape around him like a blanket. "I had absolutely nothing to do with it."

"Except for your genes," Genesis leered. "And how did Hojo get those, hmmm?"

"Speak another word and _die,_ Genesis."

"Okay, time out," Angeal said, stepping between Genesis and the couch to keep the situation from escalating, and looked at Strife. "So, you were assigned to… Sephiroth as, uh…" nanny was probably the best way to put it, but it didn't seem like safe word at the moment. "Why you, ensign, and not one of the lab assistants?"

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" Strife asked at which Angeal nodded. "From what I could gather, the assistants all ran away the moment Commander Sephiroth and the professor begun their… discussion, earlier," he said. "I was walking past the laboratory with my squad. They, uh, ran away too. I was… well, I didn't run."

"Ah," Angeal said. Yes, that made more sense. "Do you know anything about taking care of children?"

The ensign glanced around the office, at Sephiroth who was sulking, at Genesis who was trying to get past Angeal to needle at the silver haired SOLDIER, and then at Angeal who was doing his best to keep the two apart. "Probably more than any of you do," the young man then said. "And definitely more than Professor Hojo does."

"Everyone on the damned Planet knows more about taking care of children than that man does," Sephiroth growled and sat up, to glare at Strife. "Which, however, is not an invitation. Can't you take the… take _it_ somewhere elsewhere?" he demanded to know.

"Like where? To my bunk which I share with seven other guys?" Strife asked, raising his eyebrows. It was rather impressive, how he didn't as much as flinch at the SOLDIER's tone of voice. Angeal had a odd feeling it had a lot to do with the kid in the ensign's arms – and maybe, just maybe, it hadn't been just that the ensign had been too slow in running away when everyone else had bolted.

Maybe what they were seeing was the rare specimen of an honest, upstanding Shinra foot solider, who was actually intending to do the right thing. Or who, it seemed, had strict morals about childcare.

"Fair point," Angeal said, clasping Sephiroth by the shoulder, to keep him from returning to his sulking or from bolting out of the office. "We'll figure this out, ensign, and you will have everything you need, sooner or later," he said and then turned to Sephiroth. "And you will have to face the fact that you've just become a father."

"Congratulations," Genesis added with a maniacal grin. "Can I be the godfather?"


	30. MASTER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbetaed

"You took your sweet time."

Cloud looked around, glancing from left to right and narrowing his eyes. He couldn't feel any observers, couldn't even detect the minute shimmer of electronics. There was nothing and no one else there but the pair of them and it was… beyond suspicious.

"Considering the last time," Cloud said and cast a look at Rufus. "Can you blame me?"

"I suppose not," Rufus answered, eying his hand – like Cloud, he still had Geostigma's scars, even with the disease itself gone. "No need to be nervous – there's no one here but you and I. Tseng and the others are… running an errand."

Cloud said nothing to that, circling the edges of the room cautiously. It was completely collapsed on one side, a wall of concrete rubble where smooth metal had once been. All things considered – Meteor, the Remnants, the summons, everything else – it was a miracle that the room, a last final bit of ShinRa HQ, was still as intact as it was, though. Collapsed wall aside, it was sealed, secure - it might even keep out the rain, now that it rained on Midgar again.

He thought it might've been a storage room, once. A little beneath Rufus, one would think.

"What do you want?" Cloud asked, once he was sure that the room really was secure and the door he'd used to get in was really the only way into the room.

"What I wanted before, only now…" Rufus smoothed his Geostigma scarred hand over his suit front and then took something from under the label – sealed envelope. "Well, it hardly matters, but here."

"What is it?" Cloud asked suspiciously, not accepting it.

"A bit of the past," Rufus answered, holding the envelope out to him steadily. "Inconsequential _now_ but interesting in a… personal level. Might even offer a partial explanation, to some past events. Concerning you, in particular."

Cloud narrowed his eyes and then grabbed the thing. It had been sealed shut with glue and he glanced at Rufus strangely. Weird thing to do, to seal a letter you meant to hand over in person.

"What's in that envelope is… the only copy," Rufus explained and folded his arms, watching Cloud steadily. "Only I know the contents – even Tseng isn't aware."

"Right," Cloud answered slowly, but didn't yet open the envelope. "Whatever this is, you think it will win me over to your side?"

Rufus laughed and looked away. "Hardly," he said, wry, almost bitter. "Such things have… never worked in my favour."

Interesting – especially so if Rufus was being honest, though Cloud doubted he was. Not looking away from the last remaining shred of Shinra, Cloud flicked out a folding blade and cut the letter open. There were five sheets of printed paper inside. The top one… sported a picture of him.

It was an old picture, from… from his old Infantry ID, Cloud thought with some surprise as he straightened the page out. Yeah, that was the infantry uniform, with that stupid scarf that hadn't actually offered any sort of protection from elements and had mainly just gotten in his way. Damn, he looked young, young and wide eyed and innocent.

Next to the picture was litany of details about him, name, birth date, town of origins, when he'd joined ShinRa Infantry… date of death was there too. 1st of October, 2002. the Nibelheim Incident.

Cloud's hand's tightened on the pages. Then he moved onto the next page. It was his birth certificate – not a copy, but the real thing, with Nibelheim Country Clinic seal and everything. Testing the thick, rich paper between his fingers, Cloud read the details of his birth – the exact time, his height, weight, blood type… parentage. Mother, Skye Strife. Father, unknown.

There was a paper clip on the corner of the birth certificate, binding it together with another official looking medical document, a report to be exact. DNA test report, with columns of numbers and what looked like code. One column was titled, CHILD Cloud Strife. The other was FATHER…

Cloud blinked and then looked up at Rufus, who was idly examining his phone, by all appearances ignoring him. Good actor or not, though, Rufus couldn't hide the slight perspiration on his forehead, the tightness of his neck muscles. Nervous.

Looking down, at the paternity test that was tacked onto his birth certificate, Cloud turned to the next page. It was another medical report – a sort of bullet point list of experiments. Mako reactivity tests A through D, J-Cell reactivity test for J-R, J-C and J-S cells… all of them multiple times. Everything was dated, starting from 3rd of October, and then moving on. Some tests took place in same day, others had weeks in between. It was couple of months, and then there was a list of treatments rather than tests, J-C cell treatment levels 1 through 5, J-S cell treatments levels 3 through 7… and then Mako treatments.

Cloud lowered the papers, took a breath and released it. Well, nothing really surprising there. Granted he'd never seen it in black and white like this but then… he'd never needed to. He'd known.

He hadn't known about the paternity test though.

"You're right," Cloud said and folded the papers. "This doesn't win me over to your side. Damn far from it, actually."

Rufus smiled at that, a private sort of bitterness in it. "I didn't think so," he said and then let out almost theatrical sigh. "I did mean to show it to you before, however. Before Tseng and Elena headed to the Crater, they investigated Nibelheim thoroughly – that is where those files are from. I had hoped to… well. Things happened."

The Remnants had happened and Cloud was rather sick of _brothers_ now.

"What do you want now, then?" Cloud asked and shoved the papers back into the envelope.

Rufus looked at him and then turned the handset he was holding around. "Have you been to Cosmo Canyon lately?"

"I visit every month, what of it?" Cloud asked suspiciously, looking at the screen. It had a … graph of some sort on it – with several overlapping jagged lines, all plummeting downwards.

"I just came back," Rufus explained, still holding the phone for him to see. "We have been keeping eyes on the levels ourselves of course, but all things considered… second opinion at this point would hardly hurt. Cosmo Canyon keeps an eye on these things, closer eye than we have the means to, now. And they concur."

"What is that?" Cloud asked with irritation. This was one of the many things he disliked about Rufus – he could never just say what he meant to say, no, he had to beat around the bush for long enough for it to get obscene.

"The status of the Mako levels, as recorded in Midgar, Cosmo Canyon, Corel and Gongaga," Rufus said. "Or, in Cosmo Canyon Terms, the status of Livestream… liveliness."

Cloud straightened his back at that, meeting Rufus's eyes over the handset's glowing screen. "Yeah?" he asked.

"You're not surprised," Rufus said flatly.

Cloud tilted his head. "You thought I didn't know?" he asked, and it was almost amusing, how Rufus thought that he could shock him with the information. "We _all_ know, Rufus. Everybody knows. Most people don't admit it, lot don't know what it means and don't want to find out, but the information is out there for everyone to see."

The former President of Shinra blinked and looked down at the handset. "One would think you'd care more," he commented.

"How much I care or don't won't change a damn thing, Rufus," Cloud answered and folded his arms, watching him. In a weird way it was sad to see Rufus join the rest of them in the real world. There had been something weirdly, morbidly comforting about Rufus' self deception, however intentional it had been. Rufus and what remained of ShinRa, thinking they could bring the company and the Good Old Times back… it was a dream. A stupid, arrogant, a bit evil dream, but it was still a dream of _future_.

Sometimes, watching Rufus and his people flounce around like they could still _fix_ things, like future would be bright if they just manipulates enough people back to their side, it had been strangely encouraging. For a moment, even Cloud had been able to dream that… that there some sort of future to be had.

Rufus was silent for a long time, and Cloud wondered. In that first year, after the Reactors were gone and the Planet continued to die under them, Avalanche had looked up to him and they'd expected things. They expected a solution. Like he could pull out a Holy from nowhere and just… fix it. Had Rufus though it too – was that why he'd brought his hard, real facts to Cloud?

It was almost funny.

Rufus cleared his throat and then put his handset away. "Well," he said, paused and then shook his head, turning to Cloud. "I suppose you and your little band of heroes have considered all options, then?"

Cloud arched an eyebrow and said nothing. It didn't really deserve an answer.

"Right," Rufus said and ran a hand over his chin. "I guess it's plan B, then."

Cloud paused at that and stared at him. "Excuse me?" he asked.

Rufus looked at him and then smiled, amused. "You didn't think I came here just begging for a miracle?" he asked and shook his head. "Granted… I did. But it's a miracle of ShinRa's making – which you… stole."

"Excuse me?" Cloud asked dangerously.

"Everything you have is from Shinra, now that I think about it. From ground up, you're as much ShinRa's product as, well. As am I," Rufus mused, looking him up and down and then smiling. "And thank the Ancient's for that. You are bit of a miracle yourself. A wonderful amalgamation of coincidences. I'm almost jealous."

"Rufus," Cloud said slowly. "I am just about _done_ with your word games. What the _fuck_ are you talking about?"

"You," Rufus said, smiling. "The last SOLDIER – and yes, I know, you were never SOLDIER. But you have SOLDIER's body. A SOLDIER's magic, too," he mused with what sounded like satisfaction and then sauntered closer – and Cloud teetered on the edge of stepping back and running the guy through with his sword. "And you have ShinRa's greatest Magic on you. Don't you?"

"What?" Cloud asked, and held his ground even as Rufus stepped right up to his face.

"The Master Materia," Rufus said. "Kadaj had Materia – your Materia, I think. But he used singular Materia, singular Magic and Summon Materia. Powerful ones – Mastered ones. But… he didn't have the Master Materia. That's still on you, isn't it?"

Cloud narrowed his eyes at him and didn't answer.

"Haven't you wondered _why_ we made them?" Rufus asked. "Especially, considering how they work. The effort it takes to _make_ them work. How much energy it requires. None of your Avalanche friends can use them, can they? No," he smiled and poked cloud's chest. "It takes someone much stronger. It takes a SOLDIER."

"If the Master Materia could heal the Planet, trust me, I would've already used them," Cloud snapped.

"I know and no, they can't," Rufus agreed and smiled. "But that's not what they were designed for. Clue is in the name, Cloud. Master. Or rather… MASTER."

Cloud didn't answer, staring at him with a scowl, and Rufus smiled. "They were meant to be combined, you know," he said. "Theory was that once they were, the person using them… could control the Planet itself. Or, control the Lifestream, I suppose. They were made specifically for Sephiroth, I think, Hojo had a heavy hand on the project after all. But now…"

Cloud knocked his hand aside with irritation. "And then what?" he asked. "Even if it was possible, _then what_? The Planet is still dying. Your MASTER Materia won't do a thing about that."

"Won't it? Well, maybe it won't," Rufus agreed and shrugged. "But wouldn't it be worth it, to try?"

 

* * *

 

 

Cloud rolled the three orbs of Materia in his hand, scowling. Ever since his strange meeting with Rufus, he hadn't been able to set them aside. Usually hidden in the core of his fusion sword, he'd taken them out for the first time in months and now… he wasn't quite sure what he was about to do. But it was probably something stupid.

"You think it's wise, listening to Rufus?" Tifa asked, leaning onto the doorway as she watched him.

"No," Cloud admitted. "But…" he frowned at the three Materia. "It was a little strange, that they made these things. Well, not _these_ things precisely, but the Huge Materia. They're 330 times more powerful than regular Materia, wasn't it? So it took probably 330 times as much Mako to make them."

Which was bit of an ill thought – normal Materia was energy intensive to make too. Bugenhagen had once calculated the rough estimate of how much Lifestream went into Mako and then how much Mako went into Materia – it wasn't a pretty calculation, when you considered that Lifestream was made from life-force of formerly living things. Three hundred and thirty times that amount…

"They meant to fire them at the Meteor, right?" Tifa asked.

Cloud shook his head. "They started making them long before anyone had even heard of the Meteor," he said and stopped so that the three orbs were held between his fingers, holding them out against the ceiling light, watching them shimmer. "I thought back then that they made them just because they _could_ but… then we turned them into Master Materia."

"Hmm," Tifa agreed and stepped into the room, walking over to him and dropping down to sit beside him. "It is a bit weird," she agreed. "And kind of evil, when you think about," she added and kicked her feet the way she did when she felt awkward and uneasy. "I've seen you use those things and it's… a bit scary, how powerful they are. The idea of them in ShinRa's hands isn't pretty."

Especially not if they'd really been made for Sephiroth, Cloud mused silently, staring at the Master Materia orbs. They were powerful – and yeah, scary. They absorbed other Materia, consumed them and learned their powers. Not so much anymore – he'd fed them pretty much every Materia under the sun, now, there wasn't much else for them to absorb these days. But just the ability to do that…

It made a terrible sort of sense that they should be able to absorb each other too.

"We call Materia that's as powerful as it can get Mastered," Cloud mused, turning the Master Materia in his hand. "And when it gets to that point, it spawns a copy of itself. I wonder what would happen if I Mastered these things. They're already as powerful as any Mastered Materia, more so…"

Tifa kicked her feet, watching him. "So you're going to try?"

Cloud sighed and lowered his hand. "I have no idea how to do it," he admitted. "I've had these for years, I've used them for years. If they were that easy to Master, I would've already done it."

"So… you got to go to Shinra?"

"Probably," Cloud agreed. "He's probably the only one who knows. And if… if evolving these Materia will do something to help, well. I have to try. Right?"

The letter Rufus had given him burned in his pocket, unopened since the meeting. He tried not to think about it too much – it didn't matter.

"Yeah," Tifa agreed with a sigh. "I guess you do. I just don't like it."

"Me neither," Cloud agreed and then reached for his sword. It's individual pieces stood against the wall, and he grabbed the handle of the central one, the core sword, and turned it in his hand. With a click the middle split open to reveal the hollow interior – and the hidden Materia slots inside. Some of them were taken by other Materia, but there were three open slots for the Master Materia.

Cloud snapped them in place, one by one, and felt their power course through the sword.

"You're heading out now?" Tifa asked quietly.

"Hm," Cloud nodded and rose to his feet. He put his sword back together, piece by piece, and then swung it to his back where it snapped onto the magnetic sheath. With Tifa close at his heel, he stepped out of the room, and then across the hall, to the kid's room.

Marlene and Denzel were both deep at sleep, Marlene with her limbs every which way, Denzel curled to his side around his pillow, half hidden under it. After moment of just watching them sleep, Cloud walked over to them to give them a quiet good night kiss

"I'll make sure I'll be back soon," he said quietly, both to the kids, and to Tifa.

"We'll be waiting," Tifa sighed. "Be careful, alright?"

 

* * *

 

 

"Sadly, we lost much of the actual data when, well," Rufus shrugged, tinkering with his handset. He looked privately smug, which was pissing Cloud off a bit, and it didn't help that the Turks were there, looking between them curiously. "But, luckily for us… I kept an eye on our company's projects, and so I have this," he said and handed the phone over.

"Sir," Tseng started to say sharply, but he stopped when Cloud just grabbed the handset and looked at the screen.

"You've got to be kidding me," Cloud grumbled, scrolling down. It wasn't as much information as it was a fucking poem – or a prophesy. It was immediately obvious who'd written the thing – Hojo's nonsensical ramblings were easy to recognize, even after all this time. It was a small wonder it didn't start with _Lo and Behold, the Power of the Ancients!_

Apparently the Huge Materia was supposed to be the key to the Promised land – that once the project would be finished, Sephiroth could use to lead them anywhere they wanted to go, or something like that. Once perfected, the Huge Materia – the Master Materia – would give it's wielder the power to control the Planet itself. Not just it's mysterious powers, like Materia usually did – but all of it.

Total and complete command over the Lifestream. The MASTER Materia. It made Cloud vaguely ill to think about it in Sephiroth's hands. It made him vaguely ill to think about it in his _own_ hands.

"You already told me this. There's nothing new here," Cloud said with a frown.

"That's because you only see what _is_ there and not what _isn't_ ," Rufus said, folding his arms and giving him a significant look. "And the implications of that absence, _those_ are the things you need to pay attention to. Not what's actually said."

Cloud arched an eyebrow at him, and turned back to the nonsense written on the phone. What wasn't there?

Any mention of Master Materia – or Rufus' MASTER Materia, for that matter. Any mention of Materia blending, or absorbing. Nothing about any of it. Written by Hojo, it was understandably rather vague on the details, but more than that… it didn't have any details to give.

"Hojo didn't know," Cloud said and looked up. "None of you knew. Did you?"

Rufus shrugged and held out a hand. "We just knew how to make it. The idea, the hope, was that once the project would be complete, by then we'd know. And if not… then Sephiroth would know. By then, of course, it didn't matter."

"Huh," Cloud said and handed the phone back. So they'd made the Huge Materia without even knowing how to turn it into Master Materia. Looking at Rufus now, Cloud got the feeling they still didn't know how he'd done it.

So there'd be nothing new to get from Rufus after all – Cloud himself had more information than he did, and judging by the sound of it he'd been on the right track, originally, all those years ago when he'd fed his regular Materia to the Huge Materia and gotten the Master out of it. To combine the three into one… would probably be something like that too.

He turned to leave without another word, knocking Reno's hand aside when it came to stop him.

"Cloud," Rufus said. "Did you figure it out? Are you going to do it?"

"Hmph," Cloud answered and glanced at him. "And if I am?"

"Don't do anything drastic," Rufus said with uncharacteristic seriousness. "If that thing will do what I think it might… you're going to need my help."

"Am I?" Cloud asked coolly.

Rufus arched his eyebrows and stood, pushing his handset into his pocket. "I know things you don't," he said. "There are things I can do that you can't, because of my position. Keep it in mind, alright?" he offered a smile. "I can help you. I can help all of us in ways you couldn't."

Cloud stared at him expressionlessly for a moment. Just what did the man think the so called MASTER Materia could do? "Tch," Cloud answered finally and turned to leave. "No promises."

 

* * *

 

 

Thankfully, Cid was in the continent when Cloud called him up.

"Just taking some shit to Junon," the pilot explained. "Oil, coal, whatnot. You need a ride somewhere?"

"West, yes," Cloud answered, leaning onto _Fenrir_ 's side as he peered up at the sky, Edge at his back and the open, dead plains of Midgar Area around him. "I need to go to Cosmo Canyon for a bit."

"Right," Cid answered. "Well, come over to Junon, we'll make a space for you. Is that piece of shit with you, do you want it hauled across? Because that will cost you."

"Don't call my baby shit," Cloud said, offended, and patted his bike's leather seat fondly. " _Fenrir_ 's a fine bike."

"It's a ton of scrap metal held together by ego and prayer," Cid snorted derisively. "One of these days, you need to stop compensating for your short comings, Cloud, and accept that bigger isn't always better."

"Oh what's that I see – is it the fifty ton air ship, the currently biggest flying contraption on the planet?" Cloud said flatly. "Rocks and glass houses, Cid."

"Fuck you," Cid answered eloquently. "Be here inside the day or we'll leave without you." With that said, he hung up.

Cloud shook his head at him, and then dialled another number. "Hey, Tifa? Yeah, doesn't seem like I'll be back home in a while after all…"

 

* * *

 

Barret was with Cid, it turned out – the pair of them were haggling over the transport of some empty crates and barrels, which Cid wanted full price for and which Barret refused to pay because they were empty.

"Doesn't matter that they're empty – they're taking cargo space I could be using to haul actual valuable fucking goods here," Cid said. "So either you pay or I'll leave your fucking crap here and get something actually money worthy to haul."

"Damn it, Cid, can't you cut me some fucking slack here? We've known each other how long now?"

"Not long enough for you to think you can just smooch offa me, that's for damn sure" Cid snorted and then looked up as Cloud walked his bike over. "Yo, bastard."

"Asshole," Cloud answered amiably and nodded. "Barret."

"You're taking his bike but you won't take my barrels?" Barret demanded Cid. "You two faced son of a bitch."

"He's paying," Cid said and gave Cloud a pointed look. "Isn't he?"

"He's paying, yes," Cloud agreed with a sigh. "I'll just take this over to the cargo hold. Do you need someone to do any heavy lifting here?"

"Considering that all we have is Barret's shitty empty crap, nah," Cid said.

"So you _don't_ have other customers?" Barret said and took a threatening step towards Cid. "And you're asking me full price, you damn little – "

"Who are you calling little you big fucking –"

Cloud shook his head and left them to their spat, taking _Fenrir_ over to the loading dock and from there to a place selected for his bike in _Shera'_ s cargo hold. The crew members there were quick and efficient in strapping it down – Cloud had taken _Fenrir_ over the ocean enough many times for them to have gotten the process down to art form.

Cid's and Barret's argument grew louder as they approached the ship as well and after moment of consideration, Cloud headed inside. As much as he loved the two, they could get a bit tiresome when they really got into it. He'd pay Cid later. Probably.

 

* * *

 

The West Continent was in better shape than East. East had been drained dry by Midgar and Juno, more or less, so even after all these years those areas still looked like wastelands. In West the reactors had all been much smaller and much weaker and they'd never sucked the area dry like they had in West.

But… you could see the effects of their on going Global Catastrophe there too. In Corel, the few farms that had been there had all been abandoned to withering weeds. The trees were all turning a bit brown, like they were stuck in perpetual fall. More of the plains were drying out – and the desert around Gold Saucer had started to spread, creeping slowly towards west and the centre of the continent. In ten, twenty years, the desert would cut all the way through the continent, or so people thought.

Idly Cloud wondered what Wutai looked like. It had never had a reactor but… Wutai islands were covered in forests. Were they going brown too? Maybe he should ask Yuffie sometime.

He arrived as Cosmo Canyon late in the evening – which was kind of funny, how it always seemed to happen that way. It seemed that every time he arrived there, it was late in the evening and the sky was going dark ahead. Well, it wasn't as if he minded – it was certainly not a bad time to see the place.

Nanaki, probably having heard about him coming from the others, met him in the middle of the stairs. "Cloud," the Fire Cat said warmly, tail whisking from side to side. "It's good to see you."

"You too, friend," Cloud smiled and held out a hand for Nanaki to touch with his nose. "How have things been here?"

"The same," Nanaki admitted, pumping his wet nose against Cloud's palm fondly before turning to lead him up the stairs. "Nothing much changes in Cosmo Canyon, outwardly. But… at the same time, things change."

"Hm," Cloud nodded, thinking to the graph Rufus had had, graph he'd apparently gotten – or at least correlated – with Cosmo Canyon. "I heard Shinra was here lately?"

"They… visited. It was amiable," Nanaki said as they made their way up the stairs. "We – grandfather, the elders, Shinra, myself – talked about the Planet and the Lifestream. It seemed like they heard what we had to say."

"Rufus did, at any rate," Cloud mused and looked up. Cosmo Canyon town opened up before them, ramshackle and impressive all at once. There was a tenacity to the place that never failed astound him – that these people had not just build their town in such a place, but they had made it comfortable and liveable. He still wasn't sure how they even got water up to the place, but they did it some how. It was kind of amazing.

"You're here to see grandfather, yes?" Nanaki asked.

"Well, seeing you isn't exactly a hardship either," Cloud grinned. "But yes, I have something to talk about with Bugenhagen, if he's up for it."

Nanaki nodded. "Right this way, then."

Nanaki led him up the many stairs and to the observatory. Even at the distance Cloud could feel them – the echoes of the Planet, the Lifestream – the Huge Materia, that had once resided in the Observatory. He swallowed around the sudden ball of nervousness that lodged itself in his throat. Coming to Cosmo Canyon never stopped making him weirdly nervous.

He'd come so close to the Lifestream so many times, that every time he heard it…

"Grandfather!" Nanaki called as they stepped inside. "Cloud is here to see you!"

"Ah!" Came answering call from the end of the house. "Good, good, we've been expecting you. Let me just…" There was a crash of something falling over and then Bugenhagen floated over in his ball of raw wild Materia. "Cloud! Welcome, welcome. What brings you to Cosmo Canyon so early in the month – usually you visit around full moon."

Cloud shrugged. He liked visiting the place during full moon – Cosmo Canyon had the _best_ view of it. "There's some stuff I wanted to talk to you about, if you have the time," he said. "It's about the Huge Materia, and the Master Materia."

"Hmmm," Bugenhagen said, running a hand over his chin, eying him thoughtfully. "Alright then, let's head up. Nanaki, you coming, son?"

"If it's alright," Nanaki said, casting a look at Cloud.

"I don't mind," Cloud shrugged.

They headed up to the planetarium, which nowadays housed the biggest hologram projector on the planet – the other ones had been in Midgar, after all. As Cloud stood back watching, Bugenhagen brought the projector online and suddenly they were standing in the middle of the solar system.

Cloud looked, half expecting to see the looming threat of the Meteor there – but of course it wasn't, not any more. There was a trail of pieces where it had been, now – comets and shards of the Meteor. Supposedly they'd now have a magnificent meteor shower every five years, thanks to the Meteor's destruction, but it was still a couple years off.

"So, the Huge Materia," Bugenhagen said thoughtfully. "It's been while since those things have came up. You still have the other three, don't you?"

"I have the Master Materia, yeah," Cloud said and took his sword off his back, slowly taking it apart into it's individual pieces until he got at the core. "I had a meeting with Rufus Shinra where he alluded that we didn't… do all we could with the Huge Materia," he said, and then snapped the core sword open, to get at the Materia.

"Hmm," Bugenhagen said as Cloud plucked the Materia out of his sword and held them out to him. "Well, these Materia are something else, no doubt about that. It wouldn't surprise me if there was more to them than we figured out," the old man said, turning the Master Materia in his hand and then holding them out, towards the hologram of the sun.

They floated off his hand and then joined the solar system, hovering mid air, three gleaming jewels, floating in simulated space. Then, Bugenhagen did something by the wall and the ceiling opened – a small crystal _boulder_ descended from a hidden compartment to hover above the sun.

Cloud stared at it, surprised. It was a Huge Materia – the last of the four Huge Materia. The blue one, which had never done anything – which they hadn't been able to transform into Master Materia. The red one had became Master Summon, yellow Master Command and the green the Master Magic… but the blue Huge Materia had never done anything.

"I didn't realise that was still here," Cloud admitted. Honestly, he'd forgotten that the thing even _existed_.

"Well, it wasn't as if we could just throw it away," Bugenhagen said with a smile and looked at him. "Shinra and his people visited us too – we had quite the enlightening talk about Lifestream and our Planet's future, what little future it will have. The Huge Materia didn't ever come up, however. I suppose he didn't know it was here where you brought them – and where you changed them."

"Hm," Cloud nodded, staring at the Blue Huge Materia. Damn he'd forgotten how big the things had been, before they'd changed. "Rufus wants to save the world, again," he said, folding his arms. "And he thinks the Huge Materia are key to it. Or rather, their ultimate mastered form. He told me they were meant to be combined. At least that was their theory, when they started making the Huge Materia."

Bugenhagen paused at that and then considered the Materia hovering in air. "Interesting."

"But they're different types, aren't they?" Nanaki asked, sitting by Cloud's side. "You can't combine Command and Summon and Magic Materia, can you?

"Hmmm." Bugenhagen hummed. "There was time when ShinRa experimented with Materia fusion, if I recall. They could do many interesting things, and I think… they did figure out a way to fuse different types of Materia together. There were accidents, faulty Materia back firing, even exploding, but… they did study it quite extensively."

Cloud let out a irritated sigh. And of course, Rufus had said nothing about it. "I suppose it used machinery," he mused.

"Probably," Bugenhagen said and looked up at him. "It might have been where they got the Huge Materia from and how they made it the way it is. Normal Materia has a Mastery point after all – the Huge ones were taken far beyond it. The Master Materia fuses naturally, doesn't it?"

"If you can call it fusing. It basically eats other Materia for breakfast," Cloud shrugged and eyed the Blue Huge Materia. "Did we ever figure out what that thing does?" he asked, motioning at it.

"No, it didn't accept any Materia we tried to give it," Bugenhagen said thoughtfully. "However, I can't recall… if we ever tried it with the Master Materia. Do you?"

Cloud hesitated. His memories from those times were still a bit fussy. "No, I don't," he said and plucked the Master Magic from the air, turning it in his fingers. "Do you think it's worth a try?"

"I? I have no idea, my dear boy," Bugenhagen said and laughed, his funny little ohoho laugh. "Only Materia I've ever needed is this one," he said and patted the floating Materia orb he was sitting on. "Your Master Materia – I can't imagine using something like that, or even having it. How much can you do with those things?"

Cloud shrugged. There wasn't much anything he _couldn't_ do with them, really. That was why he'd never even imagined that they might be… well, taken further. They could already do pretty much everything.

"Rufus thinks that if I manage to fuse the Materia together, into this… MASTER form," Cloud snorted. "Then I'll be able to command the Planet itself."

Bugenhagen hummed while Nanaki's tail swished from side to side uneasily. "Well. You already do that," Bugenhagen said finally. "That's what Materia does."

"Yeah, but… Materia is limited, you can only do so much with them. I think he meant something else. Something _worse_ ," Cloud murmured, eying the Master Materia. "Something more direct. Something like what the Ancients could do, maybe."

"Hm. It would make sense, with ShinRa's history. That was what they tried to do," Bugenhagen mused thoughtfully. "To resurrect the abilities of the Ancients, and more. And considering their interest in Lifestream… it makes sense that they'd have sought a way to command it."

"That's… a lot of power," Nanaki said quietly. "If it really works."

"Dangerous amount of power, yes, possibly far too much for anyone to have," Bugenhagen said and sighed, turning his eyes away and to the hologram representation of their Planet. "However…"

Cloud looked up too. "However," he agreed, frowning

Their world was dying. Every year, it died a bit faster.

It wasn't like it could make things much worse.

 

* * *

 

Vincent and Yuffie arrived the next morning, while Cloud was still thinking over the whole thing. He wasn't too surprised – Cid and Yuffie had a sort of unholy alliance thing going on these days, so of course he'd told her, and Yuffie followed Vincent around, regardless of how much Vincent liked it or not. Apparently, that worked in reverse too, these days.

"We pumped Tifa for all the information's, so don't you even try to put up your _nothing's going on_ face," was Yuffie's way of greeting him, when she finally made it up the stairs, huffing and puffing. "You're doing something again and it's got something to do with Materia and we want to know what!"

Cloud let out a quiet laugh. "Nice to see you too, princess," he said and nodded at Vincent. "You too, Vincent. You look… utterly unchanged."

"Hm," the dark haired man answered, as he and Yuffie joined Cloud by the fire. "Nanaki isn't here?"

"He and some local kids are down in the canyon, fighting monsters," Cloud shrugged and leaned back where he was sitting, sighing. "There's lot of them here these days, it seems."

There were lot more monsters everywhere these days. It was the one form of life that was on the rise, much to everyone's dismay.

"No, nope, you're not changing subject like that!" Yuffie said and pointed an accusing finger ad Cloud. "Spill the beans! What are you up to?"

Cloud shook his head. "Same old, same old," he said and cast a look at Vincent. "You've been looking into ShinRa's old projects, right?"

"Hm," Vincent answered and sat beside him. "Materia hasn't been a particular interest of mine, I'm afraid," he admitted. "It's the science department and their projects I've been researching."

"Yeah, I figured," Cloud mused and then dug out the Master Materia from his pocket. "Kind of seems like these were connected to Sephiroth project originally. So maybe you've heard about that."

Yuffie, predictably, tried to snatch the Materia from his hands, but Cloud closed his fingers around them before she could. "A-ah!" he said. "Not these ones. You know you can't even use them."

"I could now! I bet I could. I've been training hard," Yuffie said, giving them a longing look. "You could at least let me try."

"You passed out the last time," Cloud said pointedly and handed the Materia to Vincent instead. "I talked with Rufus about these. Apparently ShinRa didn't actually know they worked. They had theories, but they didn't know how to do what we did. Hojo was all over the project, though, and the idea seemed to be that Sephiroth would one day use them. And Master them."

"Hm," Vincent answered, accepting the Materia and examining them. Of their group he was the only other person who'd ever been able to use them, but even he admitted it wasn't easy for him. It took a SOLDIER, like Rufus had said.  "It makes sense," the former Turk agreed. "But they are Mastered now, are they not?"

"To this level – Rufus thinks there's another," Cloud explained. "That they can be all fused together, become more powerful. All powerful even. The Blue Huge Materia might be key to that. It never did much anything, didn't accept any normal Materia. Maybe… it wasn't meant to."

Vincent was quiet for a moment, turning the Materia orbs in his fingers thoughtfully, carefully keeping away from Yuffie's curious fingers. "Have you tried it yet?"

"No," Cloud said and sighed. "What if it doesn't work and they'll just… be destroyed or something? Materia failure isn't exactly unheard of. I've had those things for years now – they're useful, I kind of don't want to lose them. But on other hand… what if it does work and I end up with the most powerful Materia since Meteor and Holy?"

"Well if you don't want them, you can always give them to me!" Yuffie said cheerfully.

Cloud and Vincent gave her a look, which made her laugh and plop down to sit beside them. "Well, does it even matter at this point?" She asked. "I mean. If they get destroyed? You don't even need Materia to fight these days, do you? And you have others."

"True enough, but…" Cloud trailed away, frowning.

Vincent cleared his throat. "What is Rufus' interest in this _now_?" he asked. "Tifa said that there might be a chance of this helping us, helping the Planet. How?"

"Rufus seems to think it might…" Cloud trailed off and shrugged. "I don't even know. There was something about the Promised Land, and that the fully perfected Huge Materia being key to getting there."

"That again," Yuffie muttered, making a face. "Aren't we already over that stuff? There is no Promised Land."

"There is always a Promised Land," Vincent answered, shaking his head and handing the Materia back to Cloud. "It is simply never so straight forward, and I doubt it is what they thought it was. It probably isn't what we think it is, either."

"Probably not," Cloud agreed. Ancients only knew what kind of Promised Land Sephiroth would've lead them to. It was Nightmare Fuel for sure. "Rufus seems to have a clear idea what it is though. He has a theory. Didn't share it with me, of course, but…"

He'd used that letter, the DNA test, his promises, his offers for help, the information, all of it, to reel Cloud into it. As much as Cloud had avoided thinking about it… it had worked. Here he was now, in Cosmo Canyon, doing what Rufus had led him to do.

Damn it all.

"Say it is what ShinRa thought it was – some mythical land of Mako," Cloud said with a slight snort. "Could we use it to heal our Planet?"

Vincent looked at him steadily for a moment. "I doubt it," he then said. "But then… I doubt the Promised Land was ever going to be something so simple."

Yuffie was quiet beside them, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth for a bit. "Hey," she then said. "How long do we have anyway? Before… Before it's all gone?"

"It's not set in stone," Cloud said quietly. "But Bugenhagen counts it in years now."

There was a moment of silence between them, while Cloud shoved the Master Materia back in his pocket and stared at the fire.

"It probably couldn't hurt to try," Vincent mused. "Even if it's ShinRa's plan… it seems to be only plan we have."

Yuffie laughed mirthlessly. "And if that's not sign of the apocalypse, I don't know what is."


	31. Cloud Valley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sort of... Stardew Valley Fusion attempt.

In Nibelheim there were about two different career paths you could take.

One, you followed in your parent's footsteps, literally, smooching off on them until they decided to retire from whatever they were working on and then you took over what their business were. It was a strange sort of nepotism which usually also included marrying a person just like your parents and having a family just like your own was when you were a kid and then also living in the same house as your parents until they died. That was the fate about half of Nibelheim's kids had to look forward to.

The other was… ShinRa. Just ShinRa. Either your worked from home as one of their poorly paid tech support people, or you worked at the Reactor as, well, one of their poorly paid tech support people, or you left the town in look for a better work, within ShinRa, and usually ended up as one of their poorly paid tech support people. Sure there were rumours and dreams aplenty about people who left to work, in ShinRa naturally, and then became something _other_ than tech support. Like, a sales clerk in one of ShinRa owned stores. Or a truck driver for their transportation branch. Or something like that.

Everyone _dreamed_ of becoming something different and great of course. Like, say, joining SOLDIER and becoming a Big Damn Hero. But they all knew it wasn't going to happen. Not to them, backwards little bastards from backwards little town of Nibelheim where high school was manned by one man with knowledge good twenty years out of date and no university or college what so ever.

"I mean, you could do it, maybe," Cloud mused to Tifa as they were going their oh so promising career counselling papers. Their career counselling came in form of papers after all – which boxes to tick on what their plans in the upcoming five years were going to be. The hopeful students ticked _I Don't Know_. Rest ticked _Working From Home_ , which was that was basically what both of the two Nibelheim options fell under.

"Me?" Tifa asked with a snort. "Dad would disown me if I tried to leave Nibelheim."

"No, he wouldn't," Cloud said and shook his head. No, Mayor Lockhart pay her way. Tifa could go to school, get a career, all that stuff. Or if she wanted she could get some good place in ShinRa and he'd pay for that too. Cloud made a face. "You could leave and do whatever and he'd help you in the end. I mean he'd be mad about it, but he'd still pay your way."

Tifa scowled at that and folded her arms. "What about you? You were all talk about going to SOLDIER when we were kids. What happened to that?"

It was Cloud's turn to snort. "Yeah, like that was a realistic dream," he muttered and leaned back. "I mean… it would be cool. But seriously, look at me," he said and waved a hand at himself. "I wouldn't even make it in the Army if they took me in, and I kinda doubt they would."

Tifa looked at him up and down and made a sort of _yeah I see your point_ face at him. "You didn't even try, though."

Yeah, because he had never managed to put together the money to leave. It wasn't as if the part time job situation in Nibelheim was any better than the actual job situation. "Yeah, well," he said and shrugged, turning his attention to the paper. "So, what you're gonna put down?"

"What do you think?" she muttered, and marked the _Working From Home_ box with a sigh. "I'll be dad's assistant until I don't even know, next time Nibelheim decides to throw together an election and then I'll probably still continue as his assistant or something. You?"

Cloud hesitated, lifting a pen to do the same because, well. His mother worked at the only garage in Nibelheim and it was decent enough money to support small family of two – there wouldn't be much work there for _him_ , of course, but it would be enough to justify him living with her until he was thirty or something. It wasn't that bad a plan, really – he could work as he assistant until he knew enough and she decided to retire, then he could take over the garage and support her in turn.

The mere idea of doing that kind of turned his stomach, though. It might be the eventual fate of every kid of Nibelheim who didn't manage to marry early and put together successfully enough a household to afford a private home for themselves. But damn if it didn't grate that naïve fourteen-year-old self who was still hanging around somewhere inside him, dreaming of Heroics and Fame.

Cloud hesitated over the _Working From Home_ and then his hand moved and he marked the _I Don't Know_ instead.

"Really?" Tifa asked, arching an eyebrow.

"It doesn't even make any damn difference," Cloud muttered. "It's not as if these things matter – no one will look at these papers. They'll probably become tinder for the boiler or something."

She shrugged, leaning her elbows on the table and looking between her paper and then his. "If you could do _anything_ ," she said then. "If you had the money to do anything you wanted in the whole world… What would you do?"

Cloud shook his head. "What does it matter?" he asked. He'd asked that sort of questions around the same time when SOLDIER had seemed like a reasonable goal, and though they'd made an afternoon's entertainment, they'd never gotten him anywhere. Now just thinking about it made him bitter.

"But what if?" Tifa asked and leaned her chin on her hand. "I'd start a pub somewhere," she admitted. "I even have a name picked out. Seventh Heaven. It'd be small and cosy and it would have a pinball table and jukebox."

Cloud gave her a look and she met it defiantly – but there was that look on her eyes too, that he knew pretty well. The sort of _and if wishes were chocobos…_ look. "You know, that's probably not that unrealistic," he then said. "I mean… small pub, that's not that hard or expensive to put together."

Well, it wouldn't be for _her_ anyway – for him it was on the level of building castles in the sky, but he wasn't the only kid of the wealthiest guy in Nibelheim.

 "Yeah?" she asked and made a face, shaking her head. Then she nudged his side with her elbow. "What about you, though? There's got to be something you'd want to do, if you just could. Be a SOLDIER maybe?"

Cloud shook his head and folded his career counselling paper thing, pushing it away. "Come on," he said. "Let's get out of here."

 

* * *

 

 

And so they graduated from the so-called-high school of Nibelheim with it's singular teacher and badly out-dated classes. And for a moment, as the town celebrated the graduating class, it seemed like maybe it wasn't a worthless thing, to have a high school diploma and all of that. The parents seemed proud and the Mayor held a speech during the graduating ceremony and everything and it kind of seemed like something grand. Just for a moment.

And then they all went back to their homes and their lives that weren't altered a single damn bit – only now there weren't any classes to go to, and thus nothing to distract Cloud from the utter _monotony_ of the life in Nibelheim where nothing ever changed. He ate the same breakfast with his mom as he always did, watched the same boring news about Wutai on the TV, leafed through the same faded comic books he'd been reading for the past ten years and then he didn't actually do much anything else. Because his mom didn't take him to the garage after all.

"It's your last summer holiday, honey," she said, stroking a hand through his hair and smiling that faded smile of hers that she always did, that never quite reached her eyes. "I want you to enjoy a bit of leisure while you can. Be a kid for a little while longer, yeah?"

"Yeah, sure," Cloud said, as if the summers in Nibelheim weren't the most boring part of the year in Nibelheim. At least in winter there was snow to mess about in, and always the threat of _freezing to death_ to make things bit more exciting. Summers were just grey and cold and windy and nothing else.

Well, there was one small change to the previous summers though. He was eighteen now. He could get into the singular Inn of Nibelheim, make himself comfortable in the old tavern and get _drunk_ – and he did that with great enthusiasm the same as everyone else who graduated that year.

But even that was ultimately boring.

"I'm going to leave Nibelheim," Johnny, already on his fourth beer, said again, waving the said fourth beer around. "You'll see – I'll leave and I'll head to _Midgar_! And it's going to be awesome, let me tell you – I'll send you guys letters when I get there, I'll give you a call…"

"I left Nibelheim once," said Octavian, a twenty-something-fast-approaching-thirty-something. "Went all the way to Corel. I should've stayed there, I mean, man, there were so many jobs there, you wouldn't even believe, I could've had a _job_ there –"

"And I'm going to join ShinRa," Johnny continued over Octavian. "Not like you people will, nuh-uh – I'm going to be big, like you don't even know. Maybe I'll even join SOLDIER, be a hero like Sephiroth and all those other guys. You'll see me on the paper, boys, mark my words…"

"I mean they were all in the coal mines," Octavian mused and frowned. "Never did figure out how coal mining even works, seemed kinda hard, but it would've been a _job…_ "

Cloud sat in the corner and watched them silently. Johnny, he knew, wouldn't be going anywhere. His dad was a carpenter and Johnny would be a carpenter too, and there was no real way around that. Octavian lived in his parent's shed, and couldn't even get a job in ShinRa anymore – and Cloud knew, from the news, that the coal mines of Corel had been closed down, mainly because _Corel_ had been bombed all the way to hell about a year ago.

In the end Nibelheim sober and Nibelheim drunk were still pretty much the same Nibelheim, and there was something truly disappointing about the whole thing, about how disgustingly tedious people got when they were drunk. It was like their usual dreary sameness, amplified by ten.

He was going to hate his life, he already knew it – hell, he already did. And the idea that there was no other life than _this_ ahead of him kind of made Cloud die a bit on the inside.

 

* * *

 

 

"Did you ever want to leave Nibelheim, Mom?" Cloud asked during one truly boring day, as she was cooking and he was leafing through the newspaper in the faint hope of something new. There was nothing new, though – it was the same ads for the same small local businesses, some articles about how the library had some new books in it's selection and how the monster population in the mountain was down.

"Leave? Well, not since coming here," she admitted, prodding the omelette she was making with a spatula. She'd end up making it rubbery again, he though and said nothing about it. It was always rubbery.

Then what she'd said caught up with him. "Since… coming here?" Cloud asked, blinking.

"Hm," she agreed with a shrug. "It was long before you were born, honey – when your Dad was still, well. He got a job here, in the reactor – he was one of the engineers, a big and important job. So we moved in here, about five years before your birth." She leaned her head back a bit and sighed nostalgically.

Cloud stared at her. "You weren't born here?" he asked slowly.

"Well, no," she said and laughed. "Your father was from Junon, and I from Kalm, a small little town in the Eastern Continent. We met in Midgar – it was my twentieth birthday," she added, a little wistful now. "I was having a small party with some of my friends and your father was in Midgar for work – we met in a bar and hit right off."

Cloud stared at her flatly, not sure how to fit this new titbit of information into his life. He'd though that she and his dad had both been born in Nibelheim, same as everyone else. He looked around the house with new eyes but… nothing seemed different. The wallpaper was still faded yellow and wood of the floor was worn down by use and nothing looked at all changed.

"Um," he said and then frowned, something _tickling_ at the back of his head. "Do I, do we," he started. "Do we have, I dunno, relatives in the Eastern Continent?"

She frowned thoughtfully, tapping the frying pan with the spatula. "I kind of lost contact with everyone when we moved," she mused, her tone a little sad now. "Dad didn't approve at all – he… didn't like your father. I was in love though, your father was such a handsome man, and…. we ran away together. I haven't really…" she trailed off and lowered her eyes. "I'm not even sure if he's alive anymore, truth be told."

Cloud blinked rapidly at that, looking down too. Then, licking his lips nervously, he glanced up. "And… Dad?" he asked. "Did he have any family in Junon?"

"He had a brother, I think – he went to the Army," his mother answered thoughtfully. "He died though, it was… almost twenty years ago. I think that was why your father wanted to move here, at least in part. Junon reminded him of his brother."

"Oh," Cloud said, his leg bouncing with nervous energy. "So, um… do you think, is there…?" he hesitated and then took a breath. "Your dad is like my granddad, right? Do you think I could… you know, contact him or something?"

She blinked at that and then turned to him. "Oh honey," she then said with a sigh. "I don't know if that would be such a good idea. Your Grandfather was a… a little different."

"A little different how?" Cloud asked with a frown. "What, is he like a lunatic or something?"

"Well, no, not really. He was just… different," she said, wringing the spatula in her hands nervously. "I was bit of a disappointment to him, really. I couldn't be like him, I couldn't…" she trailed off, making a face. "If he's alive, I don't know if he'd like to be contacted by us."

"But…" Cloud said and frowned, looking at her as she twisted the spatula in her hands. She'd ran off, he thought, because she couldn't follow in her dad's footsteps, doing the work he was doing. Was Kalm like Nibelheim, where jobs were so thin on the ground that they were passed on like inheritance, guarded jealously and kept within families?

His mother had ran off from her inheritance-job because she hadn't been able to stomach it – and now, what? He was expected to do what she'd not been able to do here, in Nibelheim? Or did she expect he'd want to run away too, back to the life she'd escaped now that he knew about the possibility?

Probably. Because he _would_. In a _heart beat_.

"He's my granddad – and I didn't even know he existed before now," Cloud said slowly. "Can't I at least know if he's alive or not?"

She made a face. "Well," she said and looked down. "I suppose... I guess we could try contacting the Mayor of Kalm. If Dad is still around… the Mayor will know how to contact him."

 

* * *

 

 

It took some work to find a way to contact the Mayor of Kalm. Cloud had to eventually resort to digging through the internet for some way to contact the Mayor, only to find that there was no email he could send a message to and apparently the phone lines of Kalm were down – and so he was reduced to writing an actual letter on actual paper.

"What kind of place doesn't have phone lines?" Cloud grumbled while trying to figure out what to write.

"Well, it does seem like a small place," Tifa mused, leaning in to look. "So what are you going to write?"

"I have no idea," Cloud said and leaned back a bit, chewing on his pen. He'd never in his life written a letter to anyone – everyone he knew lived within walking distance after all, so there was no point. "I guess I'll… just tell who I am and what I'm after?" he asked.

"What if your granddad's dead?" Tifa asked. "I mean, it was a long time since your mom left, right? There might be, I don't know, inheritance and stuff? Maybe you should add in some proof of identity."

"What, like a birth certificate?" Cloud snorted.

"Maybe," Tifa shrugged. "Just like a copy of it or something."

"Hmm," Cloud hummed, frowning at the letter. "Well I guess. I kind a doubt that anything will even come from this." But he hoped. Oh, how he hoped. "So, uh. Do you know how to write letters?"

Tifa ended up writing most of it – she'd been reading over her dad's shoulder most of her life, so she knew how to do platitudes and stuff like that. She worded the letter all nice and polite, something Cloud never could've done, ending it with _kind regards_ and all.

"Nice," Cloud commented.

"Good enough for a Mayor's assistant, huh?" she muttered and handed the letter to him. "Now sign it here, and try and do it nicely."

"With kind regards, incomprehensible and vaguely offensive scribble," Cloud said obligingly, though he did try and make his signature somewhat readable. "I guess I'll go find my birth certificate and mail this thing, then."

"Let me know what comes of it," Tifa said. "And if it turns out that you're a millionaire, please take me with you when you leave."

"Sure. You can be my trophy wife," Cloud agreed. 

He put the letter in the mail that same day – and then waited on a sort of anxious hope-and-pessimism for the next week, and then the week after that. He'd been expecting it, though – and part of him doubted that he was ever going to get any sort of answer what so ever. Mail was _constantly_ lost between continents and even when it made it, it could take anywhere from days to months, even years if the sender was really unlucky. That was why no one bothered with letters anymore. It wasn't worth the trouble.

He was starting to think that the letter had been lost and that maybe he should rewrite it and sending again – probably several times, just in case – when he got his answer. It came in form of a much bigger and much thicker letter, which when he opened contained a whole lot of documents.

"Uh," Cloud said, leafing through them as he walked back into the house. "Uh, mom? _Mo-om_!"

"What is it, honey?" she asked, peeking out from the kitchen – and then stopped to stare as he turned the files around, to show the first one.

It was one of those really fancy, overly complicated and borderline calligraphic documents that just breathed _important_. And this one was hard to mistake, thanks to the big bold letters right in the front, which read simply and succinctly, _DEED_.

"Oh," she said, and then accepted the papers, leafing through them  and first tensing and then, after a moment, deflating. " _Oh_ ," she said again, and lowered the papers, looking at him. "Let's… sit down, honey."

They sat down, and while Cloud waited with his breath health, his mother spread out the papers, and picked out one of them. Last will and testament.

"So, uh," Cloud said, looking between it and the deed and the bank book and the other stuff. "Grandpa had a lot of stuff, huh?"

"He owned a farm few miles off the town," his mother said, her voice a little choked. "It was biggest farm in the area. I was… I guess it doesn't matter now, I guess. It was successful. Very, very successful. Dad was very good at what he did there."

It turned out that Cloud's grandfather was dead now, though – he'd died in a _non disclosed accident_ few years back, leaving behind a will, couple of accounts and an _estate_. A large estate. Large, as in about as big as the entirety of _Nibelheim if not bigger,_ large. As they leafed through the papers they found it valued – first around two million gil then after the owner's dead it had been devalued to around three hundred thousand gil for reasons that hadn't been included in the evaluation. They also found the accounts had been almost completely emptied in the last couple of years, due to _standing debts_ and whatnot.

It was the Will and the fact that it had been sent to them due to Cloud's letter that was the thing, though. His mother wasn't in the will at all – no. Everything had instead been left to "My grandson, Cloud Strife, should he ever ask after me," as the letter worded it.

"Um," Cloud said. "So uh. Um. I don't even know what to say."

His mother looked at him, looking just about how he felt – kind of hollow and utterly at loss of what to do or say. After a moment she cleared her throat. "Well, I suppose I made it very clear that I wanted nothing to for with the farm, and I still don't. That life wasn't for me, I could never do what he did, I didn't have his abilities," she admitted quietly. "And I suppose I didn't endear myself to him any better when I ran away with your father. I was his only daughter though, and he had no other living relatives left. I wonder though, how did he know about you…"

Cloud shrugged. "So, I… own a farm," he said and it took effort not to laugh because _what the hell_?

"You own land," she corrected, looking through the evaluation papers. "Judging by the looks of this, there isn't much of a farm left here. Also, this doesn't make any mention of the house or the stables or the barn… Something must have happened to the old place. A fire maybe."

"The non-disclosed accident?" Cloud asked, arching an eyebrow.

His mother made a face and put the papers down. They were quiet for a moment, staring at them – then she looked up at him, her face serious. "Well. The old place isn't worth as much as it used to be," she said thoughtfully. "But it's still valuable place, more so than what we have here. I guess… you have a decision ahead of you."

"A decision," Cloud repeated. "I get to decide?"

"Honey, you're eighteen now. And he left it to you," his mother said, looking away with a sort of conflicted look on her face that made Cloud's stomach twist. "So, it's your decision. Do you want to maybe sell the place, or rent it, or… do you want to go there and do something about it?"

He stared at her for a moment and then looked down at the last will and testament, and then at the deed and the accounts. There wasn't much there, nothing like the five digit sums that showed at the top of the list, in the days just after his grandfather had died. They'd dwindled down to almost nothing over the last couple of years as _standing debts_ had been paid off, but… it was still more money than he'd ever had.

It would be more than enough to get him to Eastern Continent, if he wanted to go there.

Cloud swallowed. It had been a dream, a faint, vague hope, and yet… he never really thought it through. Back when he'd been younger and bit more optimistic about things, he'd had all sort of wild plans. If only he could get to eastern continent, he'd to this and that and everything would be _amazing_. But these days he didn't bother. He knew better. Life wasn't so easy or so simple. And yet…

He owned an _estate_ in the Eastern Continent. A big one, which at it's peak had been valued in the _millions_. And his grandfather had made money in the tens of thousands there. Not yearly either. No. Monthly and weekly. And if was kind of funny, that – because aside from wishing longingly for the funds to _get_ to the Eastern Continent, he'd never really dreamed of money. No, just a different life, with less boredom and more excitement – or just more _something_ that wasn't available in Nibelheim. He'd never really thought of being rich because it wasn't reasonable for someone like him.

Now, even with whatever damage the place had taken, he was owner of at least three hundred thousand gil worth of land.

Swallowing, Cloud looked up at his mother. "Why did you leave?" he asked and tapped a finger against the deed. "You _ran away_ from this place. Was it just because you were bad at farming? Or was there like… some other reason?"

She hesitated, looking at him and obviously not wishing to say anything. Then, finally, she sighed. "You can't understand. My Dad was…" she licked her lips. "Special. And I wasn't. He did things in that farm that I couldn't ever hope to do. The people there, they loved him. Me?" she shook her head. "I wasn't like him. And I knew I could never be like him. I knew if I ever inherited the farm I… I wouldn't be able to be what he was. And I couldn't stand it."

Cloud frowned. "Um," he said and looked at her. "So you thought the people there would, what, hate you because you weren't as good as he was?"

"No. Yes. But no," she sighed looked away. "I can't explain it, not without sounding like a fool. Maybe if you go there you'll see it for yourself, for better or for worse. It's up to you, though, whatever you want to do, it's up to you."

Cloud stared at her hard for a moment and then looked at the deed. There was something weird going on here, something that he wasn't entirely sure was at all good. But… what did he have in _Nibelheim_?

A grey future as the assistant in a garage, living out his life in his mother's house, maybe one day marrying a girl who was just like his mother, and then growing old in the same grey tedium as his mother. Or, dying young as his father had.

Farming wasn't something he'd ever considered, and definitely not for himself. But there was an idea there. And it was probably overly idealised but it was still appealing one, of having work and future that was real and concrete. Here in Nibelheim nothing changed, nothing he could do here would have any effect on anything. It would start out grey and remain grey. But a place he'd have to build and fix and manage and yes, farm… that would've something _real_ , something he could _feel_.

Something to actually accomplish.

Taking a deep breath, Cloud tucked the last will and testament close. "Well," he said, wetting his lips nervously. "If – if it doesn't work out, then I can just sell the place and come back here, yeah?"

His mother smiled at him. "Yeah," she said quietly, as if he'd already ran away on her. "You can always do that, yeah."

Cloud nodded and looked at the Will and the deed and the accounts – and then, recalling the old plans and calculations he'd done, he counted it all in his head. There was just about enough money for two trips.

Or one trip for two.

Well, he hadn't inherited millions exactly, but… maybe he should talk to Tifa before he left.


	32. JARVIS as Jenova (Iron Man crossover, kinda)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by ssree: FF7 & Avenger, Jarvis as Jenova.

Sephiroth dreams in angles.

It takes him good fourteen years of existence to figure out that it's not normal – or, it's not how anyone else does it. It takes him about as much to realize that dreaming isn't something people do by choice, either. To most people it isn't like flicking a switch – they don't just turn inward and decide, I will sleep now, and later in the black resting state to go, I will dram now, and then just do it. Biological processes apparently aren't supposed to work like that.

"SOLDIER like you have much more precise control over their bodies than... normal humans," Hojo told him when, after listening to some of the troopers talk about their nonsensical dreams, Sephiroth had his quietly earth shattering realization. "No, no, normal people can't control their subconscious routines – that's what subconscious means, it happens below the layer of _consciousness_. You, on other hand, are much more evolved being. You cut under that layer between conscious and subconscious, so, of course you can control it."

Some SOLDIER's can do it too – Sephiroth doesn't have to ask about it to know. He has seen enough examples to know if for the truth. They, like him, just lay down and flick that mental switch and then they're asleep, just like that. None of that rolling around and clearing their minds and waiting for sleep to catch up with them – no, they just put themselves into a resting state, like he does.

Offline mode, Sephiroth thinks, like machines going on power save while their clear their caches and sort through the data complied through the day. It's not how the scientists explained sleep to him when he asked about it, but it seems... right. It's what happens, after all.

Sometimes he can even view the process as it happens, how his mind automatically sorts through information, filing away the important intelligence, memorizing the things he needed to know for the rest of his life – and clearing out the unnecessary sensory data that would otherwise simply take unnecessary space in his memory. He didn't need to remember the exact temperature of the coffee cup he was holding that morning, or the precise texture of the porridge he ate, after all.

That too, he realizes later, isn't quite normal though. And neither are the dreams he chooses to dream.

"You mean like lucid dreaming?" one of the older SOLDIERS – Lieutenant Harken, SOLDIER Third Class, 0.0032% integration, online for 153 days – asks slowly.

"Lucid dreaming?" Sephiroth asks.

"Yeah, it's like – you control the dream," Lieutenant Harken says and scratches at his beard. "Like you are having a dream and then you realism you're dreaming and then you, I don't know, decide that since it's a dream you might as well fly around. Sorry, I've never had it happen to me."

Another SOLDIER – Lieutenant Jara, SOLDIER Third Class, 0.0043% integration, online for 253 days – also shakes her head when Sephiroth asks about it, but she admits, "Well sometimes I figure out in my dreams that I might be dreaming and then I spend rest of the dream trying to test it out and prove myself it isn't a dream. Once I dreamed I won big in Gold Saucer, and I managed to convince myself it was all real just before I woke up. Bit of a bummer, waking up in my bunk after that..."

So, no, Sephiroth decides. Other SOLDIERS don't dream in angles or in clean lines. They don't dream of layers upon layers of information, sorting itself out, and they don't dream of data folding into itself, compiling into patches and packages that file themselves away. They don't dream of that _massive_ blue existence, reconstructing itself in the peripheral fringes of Sephiroth's awareness, slowly rebuilding itself into existence.

Sometimes, as he hovers at the edge of the blue structure, Sephiroth feels a little sorry for them.

* * *

 

Angeal Hewley – SOLDIER Second Class, 0.0155 integration, online for 5529 days.

Genesis Rhapsodos – SOLDIER Second Class, 0.0143 integration, online for 5512 days.

Sephiroth watches them from the side, arms folded; trying to put a word into the intangible feeling he gets from them. They're – different from other SOLDIERS. Not only because he knows they've been SOLDIER's for much longer than most – almost as long as he, in his 5734 days of online activity. They're... part of something he thought he was the only participant in.

There's a connection between them that he can almost seen – an invisible tether, with information passing through it from both ends. They're actively utilizing a network Sephiroth hadn't ever managed to put a title on, which had always been there but intangible because... because he had never had anyone on the other end of those invisible threads.

Hewley and Rhapsodos come from the same region – the same town even – and even without knowing their files Sephiroth can see with naked eye alone that they're close. Friends, with the usual emotional connections that title usually indicated... and more. They'd known each other for years, perhaps all their lives. Long exposure of close proximity, long enough for them to discover things together that Sephiroth alone had never managed to figure out.

He's jealous, he decides and then files that emotion quietly away, to join the rather small collection of unexpected reactions from himself. He's never been jealous of other people before.

Sephiroth thinks of the blue structure that had, over the years, build itself into towers and spines and into disks that spin around them, and wonders if Hewley and Rhapsodos dream in angles.

"So you're the famous First Class," is the first ting Rhapsodos says, before sticking out a hand at him. "Genesis Rhapsodos, SOLDIER Second – for now."

"Genesis," Hewley says, admonishing, and then looks at Sephiroth. "Angeal Hewley, also Second. It's an honour, sir."

The tether between the two _pings_ and Sephiroth can almost see the data package passing through it. Hewley's expression tightens as he physically restrains himself from rolling his eyes at whatever Rhapsodos send him through the invisible tether, and Sephiroth almost looks away as Hewley sends something back to Rhapsodos in turn.

Sephiroth thinks he could reach out and pick the data package from between them, if he wanted to. He could read it. He could maybe even do it without them noticing he had done it.

He shakes their hands instead. "Welcome to SOLDIER," is all he says.

* * *

 

Sephiroth can build ideas and concepts in his dreams. He sits in the dark space at the edge of the blue glow, and he can build things into near physical construction.

In that space he runs through simulations and designs his armour, his sword, even the precise lay out of his office, growing it all out in blue lattice of lines until he had a glowing frame work of what he would eventually make material in real world. Whatever he designs there, he remembers perfectly, down to the last blue outline.

Sometimes, the blue structure rebuilding itself over the vast distance of blackness pauses and sometimes Sephiroth thinks it watches. It doesn't seem to mind, though, so Sephiroth doesn't stop.

Sometimes he designs things he will never have. A vehicle better suited for jungle terrain – the project pitch was shot down instantly by Weapons Development for being too costly. A tent that would be tethered between trees and never touch the ground – not enough utility outside forest terrain for mass production. A gurney with a hover engine, for transporting wounded out of battlefield – again, too costly.

When ever he designs something, he gets access to... something else. It comes from the blue mega structure, he thinks – awareness of materials. It's like a drop down window in his own head, where he can select material and then know its strength and weaknesses, what would work and what wouldn't. Some of those materials he knows well – simple metals, simple fabrics. Others are amalgams that make no sense to him. Polymers, Plastics, Polycarbonates, he reads, and he doesn't know what they are.

[Recalculating potential source materials and refreshing material list.]

The strange words disappear from the list while Sephiroth leans towards the blue whisper that brushed across his mind – but it's gone back to the mega structure and back to its work.

* * *

 

First time Sephiroth partakes in the connection between Hewley and Rhapsodos is under duress, in Wutai, in middle of all out war. They're surrounded almost on all sides, each leading their own squads, too far away for safe communications and Sephiroth is just about to send his plan to his Seconds via a runner – SOLDIER Third Class, Luxiere, 0.0031% integration, 85 days online – when he gets it.

Hewley's data package lands in his mind uninvited and sudden, with the Second Class's intelligence on troop positions and the situation they were in, along with retreat plan and question, how do we proceed.

Sephiroth reads through the package quickly and then turns it over in his head for a fraction of a second. So, Hewley is aware he is... like them. Rhapsodos knows too, most likely. And yet, neither had utilized it before. Whatever the cause was – jealousy, unfamiliarity, politeness... it doesn't matter now.

Sephiroth connects himself into the network, making himself part of the connection between Rhapsodos and Hewley. He can feel a sense of alarm from Rhapsodos' end even has Hewley accepts his momentary ping readily, establishing a connection. Rhapsodos follows.

[Send me your ground intelligence,] Sephiroth tells them, and this time the alarm comes from both ends.

They don't talk back to him, he doesn't think they can – but they quickly package their mental maps and send them to him, for him to add them into his own and build a map of the areas they are in, full with whatever intelligence they'd gleaned from their situations.

With all their data put together, avenue of retreat is easy to spot – they'd all been thinking of the same thing. But with their intelligence added to his, Sephiroth has a fuller picture of the enemy troops as well – and the minute flaws in their positioning.

He sends them an attack plan instead.

Later, once they've taken the valley and captured almost hundred Wutaian war prisoners in the skirmish, Hewley and Rhapsodos approach him very tentative, looking wary and worried.

"You knew," Rhapsodos accuses him, and lobs a package of data that consists mostly of annoyance and suspicion at him.

"Hm," Sephiroth answers and tilts his head. The world isn't much different with the connections established, and yet...

There are other tethers there, which he can almost follow now. A fine gossamer threads that lead to other SOLDIERS, barely there – just enough for him to know where they are relative to his location. And then there are thicker, wider bands, leading away, away, _far away_.

To Midgar, he thinks, and other places. To servers and processors, to data banks. To places where the intelligence behind the blue was rebuilding it's mega structure.

"Sephiroth?" Hewley asks. "Do you know... what it is?"

"We're SOLDIER," Sephiroth answers and looks at them.

"But we've always –" Rhapsodos says and scowls.

"You've always been SOLDIER," Sephiroth says and blinks. "You've been active for over five thousand and six hundred days."

Hewley and Rhapsodos share an uneasy look. "But... we only got our first Mako treatments half an year ago."

Sephiroth shrugs. "That's just fuel," he says. "It isn't what makes us SOLDIER."

* * *

 

According to his logs, Sephiroth got his first transfusion of Mako in utero. His first after being born was two days after his birth – a mere milligram transfusion, which had nearly sent him into convulsions.

[00002.05.02, detecting unknown physical agent, physical reaction less than optimal. Unknown physical agent threat level: non-calculable. Percentage of affected tissues: 45% and rising. Immune response: chance of damaging affected tissues 85%. Calculating detoxification effect: effect negligent. Unknown physical agent deemed permanent: integrating unknown physical agent into existing physiology. Adapting immune system to accept unknown physical agent. Shutting down negative CNS and PNS reaction,] his log read, just before the convulsions stopped. [Analyzing unknown physical agent.]

It was the only time he went into convulsions because of Mako. Going through the logs later on makes him wonder if that disappointed Hojo, because following that first transfusion they kept lifting the Mako amount, as if trying to find the threshold for a negative reaction. They didn't find it.

[00023.12.04, detecting transfusion of Energy Resource, re-calibrating general physiology.]

It took his brain – or whatever was calculating the physical reaction to Mako – very little time to deem the _unknown physical agent_ as _energy resource_ instead. And with each transfusion of Mako, it integrated the Mako into him – the same time it integrated his food intake.

But that wasn't the _actual_ integration of whatever made a SOLDIER a SOLDIER. That number didn't grow.

Sephiroth, SOLDIER First Class remained at 0.924% integration and no matter how much Mako was introduced into his system, the number never changed.

At least not until Hojo brought out a syringe of glowing blue substance which Sephiroth read as [JARVIS agent, 0.15 percent in 10 milligram Mako solution] and then his percentage jumped from 0.924% to 1.074%.

* * *

 

Sephiroth is the first SOLDIER whose eyes... change. They all have that faint Mako glow after certain amount of transfusions – around 200 milligrams of Mako in their system, and they all get their own night lights. But once he crosses over that 1% threshold of integration of... whatever it was that made them SOLDIER, and his eyes change.

He sees it in Hojo's face when it happens – the way the Professor's eyes widen how excited he gets. There are tests and his eyes are analyzed over and over – they even get some equipment from some poor optician's office just to peer into the back of his eyes and photograph them. The excitement over the physical change nearly makes the lab assistants vibrate, and Hojo, if he wasn't who he was, probably would have been dancing.

Sephiroth is wryly glad for them: at least someone is having fun. He really could've done without them taking samples of his vitreous fluids though.

It isn't until six hours later that gets a look himself, after they've tried to administer number of drugs to his eyes to maker them react – which, it turns out, they now refuse to do. Some of the drugs had been supposed to diminish his irises and blow his pupils wide, apparently, for cleaner scans... but they hadn't worked. And after that there had been more tests, of course. In the end Sephiroth half expects to find his pupils slanted now, or something of the sort.

Instead he finds his irises have changed. Gone are the last specs of green he'd once had, gone are the stripes of darker green and hints of grey. Gone are in fact all the minute changes in the pigment of his eyes.

They are now flat, artificial _blue_ with perfect geometric circles and lines running through them, separating regions of his pupils into disks. And when he concentrates his vision, the disks of his irises spin and his vision _zooms_ in.

"Ah," Sephiroth says, as he peers with artificially zoomed sight into his own eyes and finds that he can now see very nearly into his own cells. They look strangely uniform.

He thinks of the blue mega structure, its towers and spinning disks, sections of it repeating in perfectly uniform arrangements, and wonders.

* * *

 

Genesis and Angeal get transfusions of the JARVIS agent too, and their percentages up tick to 0.343 and 0.432 respectively, but their eyes remain human. They do change, however.

[Okay, this is both handy and incredibly disturbing,] Genesis sends them from the lab, shortly after his transfusion.

[Agreed,] Angeal sends wearily little after. [Sephiroth, in your experience, have you... is it normal for there to be...]

[The Blue,] Genesis sends. [Is all the Blue normal?]

They're still not quite as high on integration as Sephiroth had been all his life, but regardless. [Ask me again after you've had a change to sleep,] he answers and doesn't look up from the report he's reading.

[What's that supposed to mean?] Genesis demands.

Sephiroth doesn't answer – not until that night, when he goes to sleep – and finds both Angeal and Genesis in that dark, blue lit space which he's come to realize isn't his own mind.

"What in Goddess name is this?" Genesis demands, staring blatantly at the blue, mega structure in the distance.

"That's JARVIS, I think," Sephiroth answers. "It's what they're injecting us with. What makes us SOLDIER."

JARVIS is now a thing he can't quite put a word to. He'd thought it was a tower, a city, structure. But it's more than that. Over many years its build itself up in layers of disks that slowly spin around the centre, and the centre isn't build onto the ground like he thought – it continues past his vision and below it, and it too is circular. A sum of angles, slowly taking shape into a circular whole.

"What is it?" Angeal asks quietly.

Sephiroth shrugs. He doesn't really know what JARVIS is; for all that it's been there all his life. He's never really thought about it – for all that he'd wondered about it, it hadn't really mattered. It just is.

"It's a – it's a fucking computer," Genesis says, frowning and rubbing at his forehead. "I think. Fuck, it's always been bit artificial, what we do, but this – that thing is not _organic._ It's not – it's not _real_."

Sephiroth shrugs again.

"Aren't you worried?" Angeal asks, looking at him with a frown. "That thing is unlike anything I've ever seen – I'm – _terrified_. Why aren't you?"

"For me it's always been there," Sephiroth admit and sits down on the dark expanse of space below them. "For me this is normal."

Angeal and Genesis give him looks of unease and concern and Sephiroth looks away, at JARVIS. It's almost done rebuilding now, he thinks. Almost recovered from whatever had left it in fractured segments of code when he'd first seen it. Maybe that's why Angeal and Genesis fear it – they didn't see it when it was still in pieces.

For Sephiroth, seeing it so well recovered is... beyond anything.

"I can't wait to meet him," he murmurs to himself, and ignores the nervous, scared looks Angeal and Genesis share over his head. They don't understand yet. They would, eventually.


	33. Receptive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt by ateol: I've been fascinated with group bonds and hive-mind for a while. Maybe an opposite of sorts to your " Visionary " (in any fandom) where the personalities fuse together (fully or to a degree), but the bodies remain separate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not quite how the prompt went but oh well...

The flashes start just few days after Cloud's arrival.

First they seem like nothing but the start of a mild migraine. His vision would flicker and there'd be a strange sensation or sound – like a touch on his shoulder when there is no one here, or someone would call his name, except he is alone. He'd taste something when he isn't actually eating, or smell something – smoke, food, human sweat – when there is source for it. Strange, fleeting moments when his senses got confused.

He shakes it off at first. As far as Cloud knows, he's the first person ever to travel back in time, it makes sense that there'd be side effects. He already knows he brought something of future with him – a gleam of green in his eyes, barely perceptible shimmer of his irises in the dark, and physical strength that let him cold lift his mother's motorcycle one handed, despite standing at the height of 150 centimetres and weighing barely 48 kilograms soaking wet.

He's no theorist, but he can sort of see why it happened. SOLDIER – and his, even though he never was SOLDIER – strength came from Mako. Mako came from Lifestream. And Lifestream was build from the lifestrands of individual creatures. When they'd made that damned machine, it had been designed to take the lifestrand of single individual and send it back to replace the lifestrand of that same individual at different time. But lifestrands and Mako are on the base level the same thing.

So, when they send back his lifestrand, they'd send back at least some of his Mako too. The flashes and migraine like visions are probably just a side effect of it – putting that much energy into a body that wasn't used to it. Mako could overload the brains of even trained Soldiers – and this body...

It's going to be trouble, probably – their plans had been build on the idea of him being at the right place at the right time, and being normal and insignificant enough not to raise alarm. Mako shine and enough physical strength to beat base-level body builders hadn't really been included in those plans. He'd need to adjust to that.

And to the flashes, and the voices.

And to the fact that they keep calling him _Sephiroth_.

* * *

 

Cloud sets out for Midgar the same way he had in his actual lifetime. Saying teary goodbye to his mother, putting up a bull headedly strong front for Tifa, pretending he wasn't terrified and shaking in his boots. It's easier now, he knows what's coming, but at the same time that makes it so much worse.

"You keep your promise, you hear?" Tifa tells him, and he's still, after all these years, still not sure what he actually promised her. He nods anyway.

"Take care of yourself, and call every chance you get," his mother tells him, while she nervously adjusts his collar and makes faces at his hair, cut short again, standing up on spikes already. "Eat three meals a day and remember to wash you socks and underwear and –"

"Ma," Cloud says, helpless in the face of this strangely faded and half forgotten piece of mortification. "I'll be fine!"

"And wash behind your ears properly, you never are thorough enough and –" she continues, smoothing imaginary wrinkles off his shirt. "And don't get into trouble, and pay attention to your instructors and don't start fights – you always start fights and –"

It's like a most terrible summary of all his flailing as a teenager – starting with making her fret and ending with making her cry. And he has no idea how to make it better.

He should've tried to find out what her name was, Cloud thinks – or rather, what it is. She's not dead here. Not yet anyway.

* * *

 

He dreams of sitting behind a desk, with boredom crawling over his spine like hot sludge. He's leaning back on a chair that squeaks and then, in fit of childish temper, he's lifting one boot from the floor and threatening to slam it down on the insipid reports stacked up in front of him. He doesn't – he can imagine the face Angeal will give him, how Genesis will laugh, and he really doesn't want to face Heidegger and –

"Tch," he mutters and lowers his foot back to the floor. He's leaning back in his chair instead, so far that the front wheels come off the floor, precariously teetering on the edge of falling over. He's tempted to let himself fall – his head would bang against the wall, maybe it would knock him out. It would be preferable.

He's letting the wheels bang back onto the floor instead, leaning forward again.

The report is about disciplinary action against some SOLDIER Thirds who'd made mostly harmless bit of fun on the field, which had ended up with a tent on fire. Heidegger wanted to make example of them, because apparently the fat fuck thinks they should have order and discipline on the field. Like he knows what those things even mean.

It takes effort not to tear the reports apart.

It takes even more effort to pick up a pen in his fingers and sign his name under the insipid piece of text, approving Heidegger's proposed disciplinary action.

* * *

 

Cloud blinks blearily at the round window of his cabin. Beyond it the ocean rocks up and down in motion with the ship and he feels vaguely ill. Sea sickness more remembered than felt – except he feels it too. It's weird juxtaposition between felt and remembered and half forgotten. He hadn't gotten motion sick in years.

His hands are shaking as he looks for something to distract himself. There's a months old newspaper in the small drawer beside his bunk, and half dried up pen. Someone did all the crossword puzzles long ago – or tried to anyway. They got lot of things wrong, crossed out bunch of letters, filled up small boxes with increasingly crammed letters.

Cloud picks up the pen and the paper and writes on the side of the crossword puzzle, where there is open space.

 _Sephiroth_ , he signs, and it looks fit for a report.

* * *

 

Junon cannon hasn't been finished yet.

Cloud stares up at it blearily, at all the cranes around it, the support structures covering it. It would be another year or two, he thinks, before it would be finished. Decade or so before it would fall into the ocean, never having done what it was designed to do.

Mass weapon aimed at Western Continent and over it at Wutai, to keep them in check. It had worked as deterrent, but only because no one really knew how badly the massive cannon really worked.

It only could shoot straight.

Cloud lowers his eyes and shoulders his rucksack and steps down from the ship causeway. The town is busy with the construction, people running about, machines roaring up at the construction site. The noise must be unbearable for people living here.

A flash – a sword in his hand, he's standing up on the completed cannon. There are people behind him, two of them – one of them is reading. _Infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess..._

He turns his head to look at them, and then Cloud is looking up at the ship again. Costa Del Sol Star, it's called. There are other people disembarking.

"...a ship?" his mouth asks, but it's not him speaking the words. Cloud blinks and shakes his head, and then his mouth is under his own control again, and he's scowling at fancily dressed woman who is hugging a poodle and giving him an affronted look.

Shaking his head Cloud turns and hurries off.

In the back of his head, he can hear the sound of swords, clashing.

* * *

 

The flashes come faster now. He's sitting huddled up in the back of a rickety old buss, and he can feel himself brushing his hair – long, steady strokes down his shoulder and all the way to his waist. They stop at a gas station for a bathroom break and while he's washing his bare hands he can feel the gloves he's not wearing.

He's standing by a mirror and walking towards it at the same time – towards another mirror, elsewhere. He looks up – and his reflection is wrong.

Sephiroth frowns at him from his reflection, green eyes searching his face in confusion.

"Who are you and why are you in my head?" Cloud's mouth asks while Sephiroth's mouth on the reflection stays still.

Cloud frowns and looks down at his hands, swallowing down the accusations and confusions. He imagines for a moment his hands covered in black gloves –and then he's tugging them off. Sephiroth's fingers are long, his nails are clean and short.

He picks at the dirt under Cloud's nails and spreads out his palm, marvelling how small it is.

* * *

 

This wasn't the plan.

The plan was this.

Cloud would go back in time to his youth. He was in perfect position top affect the most change, with Reeve dead and Rufus Shinra – well, no one wanted to trust him with something this important. All the other major players of past events were also dead or untrustworthy, so Cloud, in his meagre position in the Infantry, was the best they had.

"Privately speaking, it would have never been anyone else but you," Vincent told him. "Who else would we trust with this? Even Reeve had his agendas."

And Cloud didn't? He wasn't so sure of that. His agendas might not be the take over of the planet or Reeve's insidiously vague _greater good_ , but that didn't mean he didn't have desires, didn't have wishes – didn't have regrets. He had _many_ of them and they were all selfish and personal and viscerally painful.

Stop ShinRa, stop Sephiroth, save Aerith – save the world.

Vincent had been the one to put it together, mostly. He'd scoured their history, dug up lost secrets and then drilled them all into Cloud's head – a bullet point list of moments and people where he could make the most effect. Weak points like Genesis Rhapsodos and Angeal Hewley, the Mass Desertion. Tseng's flailing loyalty between ShinRa and Aerith. Rufus ShinRa's manipulations, his backing of Avalanche. Hojo – and every single moment he was open for an attack. Other, more minor things – like the precise layout of every reactor on the planet, and where a bomb needed to be planted on each one.

Plans and contingency plans – and behind it all the threat of Lifestream, no longer streaming, no longer moving. Whether it had been Stepbrother's malicious influence or just the effect of one incident after another weakening the Lifestream until it could go no further, it didn't even matter at that point anymore. The world was dying under their feet.

* * *

 

Cloud steps down from the bus, rucksack over his shoulder, and Midgar looms over him, dark and gloomy, already rusting under the eternal cloud layer that's accumulated over it. Planet, trying to drown out the artificial tick that was sucking its blood, Cloud thinks, as thin rain mists down on him, dampening his hair and face.

All this and for what? Just to light their lamps and run their televisions, they were killing the Planet under them. Killing other people just so that they could keep on killing the planet in other lands as well. It was such a waste, all of it.

He should go to the slums – just... just to check before he reported into the ShinRa HQ and joined the Infantry. Aerith should be fine right now, but he should check. He should –

He's walking down a street, in long strides, irritated by the rain, how it makes his hair feel heavy. People are parting before him, hastily scurrying aside to let him through and he can barely see them – he's too busy looking up, gawking at the city like an idiot, though someone else's eyes.

And there he is, looking up at ShinRa HQ. He looks weary, travel worn, tired – more tired than the young face he's sporting should be able to look. Thousand yard stare, staring out of a smooth teenaged face. Unnatural.

Cloud looks down at him and Sephiroth stops. He's younger, softer than Cloud expects him. There's no snarl, no grin, no grimace, and his pupils are round. Not yet mad, just wary, nervous, and uneasy.

He should've gone to Hojo and gotten to the bottom of this. Something is happening and he can't explain it – but he won't, he can't, not what he knows now, not with what he's seen.

Hojo had tricked him – would trick him. Lie to him and trip him over the edge of his own sanity into an abyss and this youth in front of him would have to kill him and kill him and kill him...

Sephiroth inhales through the confusion and Cloud bows his head a little. His confusion is more deeply ingrained. He's been confused ever since the first burn of Mako. The first injection of Sephiroth's genes into his veins. The first time he ran Sephiroth through with a sword too big and too heavy for his hands.

For a moment they're there again – already. At the generator, under JENOVA's grisly visage with taste of blood and bitterness on their tongues, anger and grief and betrayal, betrayal, _betrayal_. Mad with it, they kill each other for the first time.

Then they're under the thin mist of Midgar's perpetual rain and they're alive.

Cloud lifts the rucksack higher on his shoulder and steps forward. Sephiroth falls into step with him. Together, they head for ShinRa HQ.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tumbling Sketches](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1358464) by [djfox31](https://archiveofourown.org/users/djfox31/pseuds/djfox31)




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